After 10 years living in Oxford, the long, cold, dark UK winters had finally worn us down and we decided that enough was enough. So we upped-sticks and moved to Sydney.
Australia is a great place to live. Great food, great wine, great weather, great beaches... and right now I wouldn't want to be anywhere else. If you've never been here, you should try it some time.
I have a few jobs (I'm easily bored), and amongst other things I work as a Japanese translator/interpreter. It requires a lot of concentration (particularly if you're doing simultaneous interpreting at conferences & meetings) and it can be a lot of fun, but like any job, sometimes it can be dull too -- business reports and patent applications are dry, whatever language they are in.
Every now and then though, if you're lucky, you get the opportunity to work on a really interesting project, and recently I translated a series of novels by a Japanese author called Amy Yamada (aka Yamada Eimi) which has been published by St Martin's Press. Unfortunately there's very little money in literature translation, and if you do it right it takes ten times as long as ordinary translation -- you spend a lot of time trying to conjure up the right phrase or the perfect nuance to convey what the author was trying to say when they wrote it. Of course, that adds up to long hours and very little pay, but there is no doubt that it gives you a much greater sense of achievement, and I would probably do a lot more of it if I didn't need to earn enought money to put food on the table... call me old-fashioned, but I like to eat EVERY day if I can.
My new pet project is BoozeMonkey , a social network for Australian & NZ wine lovers. You can chat, make friends, contact your favourite wineries (yes, they will talk to you) and review your favourite wines. It's pretty cool -- check it out!
