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A TIP FOR TRANSLATOR’S BLOCK.

Translators, freelancers, creatives of any art…. We all have felt it. When the deadline is approaching quicker than Khaleesi’s dragons  but your progress is slower than George R.R. Martin’s writing pace of the next GoT book! You really want to give it all and finish the masterpiece you are translating in a few hours, then open a bottle of wine and chill out waiting for the big translation award committee to come knocking on your door with your nomination! OK I might have taken it too far but you really want to reach the finishing line and get.some.rest.But you can’t. Everything is going wrong. You catch a cold, your neighbor calls and wants to talk about cooking, there’s a power cut or you just plainly have-run-out-of-energy! And the bad news is, you can’t do anything about it but slowly drag your sorry self around the housemoaning «I have so much to do» without really doing anything!

Do you know what the only solution is?

– TAKE A DAY OFF!

Or just an evening. Even if you think you don’t have the time, just do it. You will be so productive the following morning you will gain the «lost» evening in a few hours. Make sure you don’t spend all time stressing about the job, though -just pretend it doesn’t exist for one afternoon. Do something for yourself, relax, exercise, order take out or go for a drink. You will feel so nice and energized the following morning, you will fall in love with your job again! Trust me, it works!

It works for me even when I really don’t think I can afford losing an entire afternoon (how will I manage to catch up with all those pages?). It really pays as you wake up in the morning fresh, a tiny little bit guilty (just enough so that to not press snooze) and happier than the day before – because you did something for yourself and you do not feel that your job is draining all your energy anymore!

What do you think? Have you tried it? How do you deal with translator’s (or writer’s) block?