Evenin' all.
I've not been quite so active on here lately as I've been rather busy writing a book. As a few of you know, I'm quite into birds and I was struggling a bit with foreign birds names, so as an excercise, I wrote a book on translating bird names from English to French, German and Dutch:



http://www.lulu.com/tdk199

European Bird Names: A Translation Guide is designed to complement the most successful bird guide to European birds and with the languages included, it can be used in more than ten European countries (and a few microstates) as well as parts of North Africa. It goes from the commonest to some of the rarer birds in Europe and has diagrams for naming body parts of birds in the above languages.
Just the ticket for ex-pats who are interested in this sort of thing and also for locals here who'd like to know what the hell I'm on about in their own language. It's a handy pocket-size volume at 100 pages.

I've also redesigned my website: http://www.tonykeenebirds.co.uk to include more Swiss species and give a layout that's much easier on the eye than the old version.

Crikey - that was some work to do that lot...

Cheers,

Tony

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New book out now: European Bird Names: A Translation Guide.
www.tonykeenebirds,co,uk - photos, paintings and drawings of Swiss, Australian, NZ and British birds

That is a huge achievement. Congratulations. Hope it does well. Probably not going to outsell Harry Potter though

Ha! I'd be surprised if it outsold 'Knitting for Paraplegics' by I. P.Freely, but I'm happy enough just to have a copy to go birding with for myself. Those birds names just don't translate literally and even people who speak both French and German seemed to be having trouble at Fanel when trying to communicate to each other.

Congratulations for the book, it looks nice.

I understand what you mean about bird name translations, it's difficult to memorise the english, french and german name for each bird.

Congratulations...writing a book is a huge undertaking! On a separate note, how did you find working within the Lulu structure (I've been contemplating this myself)?

Jack

Congratulations! There are great bird watching opportunities in Switzerland. Can you tell me, is it true Big Bird is just some guy in a costume?

Congratulations! A dedicated bird watcher you must be.

That's amazing! Congratulations!

Now could you please do one for Fish as well ;-)

Muchos kudos to anyone who can write a book.

Or read em.......
Congrats CB, you done good.

Congratulations not everyone could do what you have done especialy with all the difficult names and translations.

Congratulations. Hope you will be having to do another print run soon.

I do know what you mean about translating names, as we had some trouble with the housing requirements for our cockatoo due to the confusion over her correct species name in German. In the end we resorted to the Latin and that seemed to get things sorted out..for now, anyways.

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Congratulations Colonel!

Congrats, thats a super achievement.

Thanks, eveyone!

Jack - working with the Lulu framework is ok. Just be sure about what you want at the end of it as it can make quite a difference as to how you lay it out. If it's a book just to publish on there, then it's not so much of an issue, but if you want an ISBN, then the formatting is different (larger bleeds, larger white spaces around the body text, etc). They do spring a few bits on you near the end. Any books sold through distributors (Amazon, etc) will be bought by them at half price, so your share of the money goes down accordingly and any sold that way will also be subject to US witholding tax of 30% unless a from GUGJBKH6856758765 or whatever is produced, which probably means you pay the same amount to a different country instead.
At least it's print on demand, so even if it never sells a copy, I don't have a thousand of the buggers hanging round the house...

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New book out now: European Bird Names: A Translation Guide.
www.tonykeenebirds,co,uk - photos, paintings and drawings of Swiss, Australian, NZ and British birds

Awesome mate, well done.

Congratulations - a great personal achievement I'd imagine. I really need to get mine finished in the next 12 months, but I've been saying that for the last 12.....

Pat

Good for you. I LOVE IT!
I'm so very proud of you!!

Colonelboris, I salute you! An achievement not to be sniffed at (although I, being doglike, love sniffing things, especially new books). I've an inkling of the amount of work that went into it as I've helped edit and proof-read two books.

So lulu.com is like trafford.com (that's Canadian, methinks).

Awesome work..congratulations.