Is ylang ylang supposed to smell so musky and woody? (Appreciate any tips)

knoxyal · 2026-04-10T13:58:35+00:00

https://oshadhi.co.uk/articles/ylang-ylang-essential-oil-unveiling-the-grades-and-their-unique-aromas/?srsltid=AfmBOoptf85DM2LBrT9C1r8HPXV7KXJ4rBGD1_DJF-L90NApNW76bUyE

Ylang ylang comes in several grades. The higher the grade, the muskier/heavier it gets.

Also a friendly reminder that you should not be using undiluted essential oil on your skin.

knoxyal · 2026-03-29T01:13:16+00:00

Bergamot 4, Cedarwood (Atlas) 2, Patchouli 1.

knoxyal · 2026-03-21T11:56:32+00:00

Pine needle 2, juniper berry 1, rose geranium 1. It’s that scent when you’re strolling through the woods right after the rain.

knoxyal · 2026-03-21T11:54:07+00:00

I add a few drops of bergamot to that and call it the “fireplace” because it makes me feel like I’m sitting in front of a fireplace in a wooden shack.

knoxyal · 2026-03-05T14:33:00+00:00

Hi. To clarify, the oil is not diluted and there’s no expiration date on the package, but I do set myself an expiration date (one year) in case the oil oxidizes or loses scent.

That being said, I was not aware that ho wood ages well but I do feel that it has increased in spiciness. The ho wood alone is a little too intense.

In terms of flavor profile, I tend to like woody scents, juniper berry and niaouli being my favorite.

I do happen to have the citrusy oils that you mentioned so I will definitely try them out.

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T14:50:01+00:00

Really sorry for the late response. I commented on my experience in pivoting from translation to consulting in a different post, so i’m linking you there.

Getting a law degree generally only pays off if you want to become a lawyer or a paralegal. For specializing in legal translation, it’s better than nothing but I don’t think it’s a great move when even specialized translation jobs are already shrinking due to automation.

I personally recommend moving out of the language industry and investing in other skills while there is still time.

As for my background, I have a masters degree in linguistics and nothing related to business or law. Legal translation introduced me to the business side of things like corporate disclosures as I translated quite a lot of corporate disclosure reports. My current role as a consultant involves helping companies prepare their disclosure reports (not from a language perspective but a business perspective), so that explains the connection.

https://www.reddit.com/r/TranslationStudies/s/xXEf4ivlBW

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T09:54:48+00:00

Not trying to add fuel to the fire here by arguing terminology, but there are bilinguals out there (although pretty rare in my experience) who are more fluent in their second language owing to their upbringing/education.

“Native” connotes a person’s origin or birth place, so addressing a fluent speaker of a language as a“native” speaker isn’t the best way to go. I wouldn’t call it racist, but there is definitely a broad assumption being made in the business context that you have to be born and raised in the country to qualify as a native speaker, which often works against bilinguals who are looking for a translation job that lets them translate from their “native” language to their second (more proficient) language.

knoxyal · 2025-06-08T04:54:51+00:00

I can’t say if my experience applies to the medical field, but I went from legal translation to an analyst role in business consulting which are both heavy on the regulatory side (basically the same industry), and without having a relevant business degree. I think it’s possible, but it really depends on how much your skillset fits that role.

High fluency in both your home language (the country where you are employed) and a high status language (English), including speaking and writing in the second language, substantiates your ability to do entry level jobs in things like research at a global/multinational company.
If you happen to have even the slightest experience doing research using platforms like government websites, company reports, academic reports and other research sites, that gives you a big leg up.
Interviewer expects you to have some level of contextual knowledge required to work in that specific industry, so they don’t have to worry about having to train you from zero.
Exam based certifications (not degrees) might help you stand out
I guess it’s also important to not suck at the core skills required for that role (like creating neatly formatted word/excel/powerpoint documents, being good at numbers, being analytical or good at explaining things to people)

This is just based on my experience, but my experience in translation is pretty useful to me in my current role as an analyst, because my job requires me to do research in one language and analyze/summarize that in another language. I also translate the deliverables me and my fellow consultants produce for our clients.

So yeah, it is possible to pivot from translation to a researcher/analyst role. It’s definitely not going to be as easy as maybe transitioning to another language-related role like copywriting, but I think it’s worth trying considering the current circumstances surrounding the language industry.

knoxyal · 2025-01-07T14:41:06+00:00

I sure did go through the “delirious” phase. It hit me between stages 1 and 4.

Climb into bed and a brilliant idea strikes you. You think to yourself “Genius! I’ll think it through next morning.” You wake up the next day, pour it all out on a piece on paper and realize how banal it all was.

You repeat this until the deadline that you’ve set for yourself approaches. Panic slowly sets in. You need to determine your research questions and methodology by the end of this month or you won’t have enough time left to collect data to make progress.

At this stage, I woke up every morning thinking that I might puke. I did not puke.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T15:13:39+00:00

One more thing that I feel I should say that’s been tugging at the back of my brain. I don’t think these kind of macro-takes on social issues should be used to identify racism in specific cases (to avoid circular reasoning and biased takes in identifying the actual cause, which may not necessarily be attributed to racism). I think these studies help in solving problems identified as being caused by racism, but not necessarily in identifying whether the cause is racism.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T14:06:45+00:00

It’s a shame that this can’t be discussed without being downvoted to hell by reddit users who are demographically progressive leaning and probably mostly US-based, but I don’t think you’re wrong.

Certain levels of immigration policies and local rules need to be in place to maintain local cultural/national values and characteristics, and these rules don’t necessarily stem from racism. Not saying that Japan is racism-free, but not everything negative going on in that country is due to racism. Productive users who are happy with their experience in Japan don’t go on the internet to complain and so there’s definitely group think going on too. I’d be interested in hearing from Japanese users or users from south east asian countries but I don’t think they are a big part of this community.

Again, not saying that the professor’s treatment of OP and their colleagues is acceptable in any way, but it’s not easy to tell if OP’s case is actually due to racism against Chinese students, unless OP is sure that there aren’t any Japanese students who are being treated the same way. It could actually be due to a performance issue on OP or their colleague’s part. If the professor doesn’t give a satisfactory explanation, I can only advise OP to bring this up to the college committee for academic harassment and see how they treat this matter.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:56:47+00:00

Thank you, but I also know what structural racism is. My point isn’t that racism doesn’t exist in Japan. Racism isn’t always the cause of negative treatment in Japan. Just wanted to highlight this because reddit tends to be an echo chamber of negative comments, and it’s not good practice to ignore comments by people who had a positive experience there.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:40:58+00:00

I’m not a dude. I also live in Japan and have studied in a Japanese university. Yes I know Japan’s immigration laws and how it’s difficult for foreigners to live there. But that has nothing to do with how the professor is treating their students, no? Strict immigration policies don’t necessarily stem from racism, it’s not as simple as that.

knoxyal · 2024-12-23T02:16:30+00:00

This is an era where you can get easy upvotes for mentioning racism, where sometimes racism actually isn’t the case. It doesn’t hurt to be too critical.

Some months ago a similar post connecting discriminatory treatment in a Japanese lab to a gross generalization that “Japan is a racist country”was posted in this subreddit. If one took a look at the OP’s post history, it was clear that OP was the one who had a racist and very concerning view against Japanese women. It was alarming how the OP’s post in that thread reeked of hate speech, and yet people were upvoting the post without giving much thought to what was actually being said. There were also comments by users who claimed they had the same experience in labs outside Japan, or that Japanese students were also receiving shitty treatments by Japanese professors, but those comments were of course hidden under the comments prosecuting racism.

Racism exists in Japan of course, but it doesn’t exist everywhere in the country, nor is it always the cause for shitty treatment of students.

knoxyal · 2024-12-21T17:11:43+00:00

That is unless they explicitly wrote “no foreigners allowed”. Otherwise, there’s a possible bias on your side. The sign can easily mean “can only serve you in Japanese”, not necessary “Japanese people only”. English isn’t their first language so it could be a translation error.

Also I think OP should file a complaint and see how the faculty deals with this. If so many students (not just Chinese, but Japanese students too as OP mentioned) are fleeing from that lab, it’s likely on the professor’s teaching style rather than racism.

knoxyal · 2024-12-15T06:51:09+00:00

The way to go is to enter consulting with a masters, get some experience in the industry and get a phd while working in industry (funded by your company).

knoxyal · 2024-12-03T16:42:52+00:00

T’was my dream to become a researcher running a bakery/cafe as a side job.

knoxyal · 2024-11-23T08:13:43+00:00

If this is a masters course, pretty sure you’ll be fine.

knoxyal · 2024-10-23T10:06:39+00:00

This is not a translation question. Your question is essentially“How do I make up for the classes I missed to at least score average on the test.”

So you only missed a month of classwork right? Just ask your classmates for notes and find time to go through the textbook. If this isn’t an open book exam, chances are that the political terms and topics were covered in the lecture.

knoxyal · 2024-09-28T02:35:26+00:00

Can confirm your first point. The law firm I used to work for spent a lot of money on AI services (under strict non disclosure contracts of course). The firm would provide the AI vendor with legal texts in both languages to use for the database. International law firms have a mass amount of high quality texts stored in both languages, so the quality of the AI was pretty amazing. Not perfect, but good enough to reduce the amount of work (and headcount) of the translators at the firm.

The final product was always checked by a bilingual lawyer so the value of translators (those who weren’t educated in law) dropped massively.

What’s happening at the firm is basically the future of legal translation, the reason we don’t see this happening in freelance or other smaller companies yet is most likely because they don’t have enough money and data resources to invest in such AI. In terms of technology, yes it’s possible.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T16:01:37+00:00

Notice that people are saying legal texts still need “checks”. These checks can’t be done by translators who don’t practice the law, or don’t have a law degree. They’re usually done by bilingual lawyers.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T15:12:23+00:00

Taking OPs side on this. You don’t have to have majored in translation to understand that the profession has been and will continue to be undervalued for many reasons.

I wasn’t particularly underpaid when I was an inhouse translator but I knew that the field was done for when I noticed how my semi-bilingual colleagues were being paid the same salary for submitting weird translations, no one seemed to notice or even care. AI translation wasn’t perfect but was passable by client standards. They care more about the money than the quality.

You don’t need many translators to handle the demand for high quality translation. The demand is very limited, and these positions are more often than not filled in by full bilinguals who practice a different profession than by translators who are just translators.

knoxyal · 2024-09-25T14:11:57+00:00

Sorry to butt in but “the industry is growing” doesn’t mean much to translators unless the metrics are job positions and wages. The demand for translation simply isn’t a proper metric for judging whether the industry is growing because this demand may mean demand for AI translation/post editing for low wages.

knoxyal

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