Work seems to have entered another multilingual phase which is very pleasant. I’ve been translating from Spanish to English. I’ve decided to get my Finnish out of the cupboard and shine it up a little. I’m following French politics. And Welsh and Italian are just ongoing.

For Finnish, I’ve decided to follow Alexander Stubb, @alexstubb, on twitter. He’s the prime minister and leader of the National Coalition Party. He tweets in Finnish, Swedish and English and he can’t get too complicated in 140 characters. So following him is ideal for brushing up some basics and starting to put together a technical (political) vocabulary. These words go into my LangScriv project.

One of my Spanish projects is for a small winemaker: descriptions of wine, the website, a press release. All of these use technical vocabulary (geology, processes and so on) so that’s in LangScriv too – in the Spanish chapter.

I’ve turned off all the spelling and grammar checkers as Scrivener doesn’t have Finnish. It does, though, have four types of English, two types of Portuguese, and a clutch of other languages (nine, in fact) so I’ll use it in the future. Edit / Spelling and Grammar / Show Spelling and Grammar / box at the bottom ‘automatic by language’

Scrivener has all the accents I need at present. Edit / Special Characters / Latin

Past experience tells me that I should write out vocabulary by hand in order to learn it soundly. That’s why I’ve got all those vocab exercise books, of course. What I’m doing with Scrivener is building personal dictionaries. Let’s see whether the words make it into my long-term memory.