Greetings, one and all – and many thanks for browsing my website long enough to find this!

This won’t be a fully fledged post, but I did think it would be useful to spend a paragraph or two setting out what this blog will be, and the purposes it’s intended to serve.

It’s my hope that this blog will allow me to set out my values and priorities (‘philosophy’ seems too high-flown a word) as an editor and translator, in more detail than my services or FAQs pages permit. I’ll also be very surprised if those values don’t end up evolving as I go. Writing thoughts and ideas down is, after all, one of the most effective ways of crystallizing precisely what you think, and of determining where that thinking needs tightening up. I see no reason why the same shouldn’t go for working practices. By explaining what sort of editor and translator I am, therefore, I hope to become a better one.

On a less earnest note, I’d also like to use this space to explore other language-related topics that intrigue me, and which I don’t have the opportunity to write about elsewhere. With any luck, most of them will be related to editing and translation in some fashion, but I make no promises.

That remit is obviously fairly large, and I plan to cover as wide a range of subjects as possible within it, including:

• news, debates and curiosities from the worlds of professional editing and translation;
• my experiences of freelance work;
• various thorny questions of English grammar and vocabulary, which will hopefully be of interest and value to both native and non-native speakers; and
• software (particularly free and open-source tools) related to editing, translation and writing more broadly.

In short, the aim is for this to be part professional blog, part language-wrangler’s journal. I’ll try to keep things varied, and I’ll do my best to contribute one or two posts per month. Obviously, if there’s anything you’d like me to cover, or you’d just like to vent your frustration with my writing style, do let me know in the comments.

Anyway, I think that will do for the time being. Thanks for reading, and watch this space for more in the very near future. In the mean time, you may be interested in some of the articles I’ve written for History to the Public, the public history site where I also serve as Managing Editor. New readers are always welcome!

Featured image: ‘Hello’ by Damian Gadal, provided under Creative Commons licence CC BY 2.0.