Up and at 'em...

[alexpgp]

Dealing with mosquitoes last night sort of took the edge off of missing this place, but when I went out to the car this morning to get something out of the trunk, I found myself under close observation by a rather large doe, who was standing about 20 yards off my path to the car. The animal evidently concluded I was not a threat and went back to consuming what few plants spring out of what passes or soil on the property. Of course, this occurred only after posture and orientation adjustments were made to keep me within her peripheral vision. Bon appetit, as the French say.

An on-again-and-(mostly)-off-again client asked about my availability for translation work, which I declined, which resulted in a follow-up query as to my availability to do editing.

I've made my thoughts pretty clear in the journal about what I think of editing. The short summary is that it's a lot more work for a lot less money. (It's almost as if most of what one is being paid for when translating is keyboard entry!)

At the risk of alienating the client, my response included the following:

To be frank, the demand for my services is high, and editing
is financially the least efficient way for me to commit my productive time.

There are, of course, clients who throw a sufficient volume of translation work in my direction to allow me to justify doing the occasional editing job for them (i.e., work at a reduced rate) as a gesture of good will.

I've done a preliminary inspection of the scope of work I have to do here. I have primary objectives (find specific stuff) and an overall objective of getting rid of as many things (read: books) as possible. Now the question is: how long will this take? The week is half gone already.

Cheers...

Comments

[halfshellvenus.livejournal.com]

So, do you find editing to be fairly exhausting?

I mostly run into it via people wanting me to beta-read stuff, and unless the person is a fairly skilled writer already... the issues of trying to get them to convey what they mean correctly, AND still keep their own voice, is really tiring.

Someone who kept sending new revisions with bonus new mistakes because "I don't really 'get' verb tenses" just utterly wore me down. 500-600 words of pure hell, from my side of things.

I find editing to be as much work as writing, and frankly, I would rather just write. Then I'm only fighting myself, not also someone else's constructs/limitations/stunted-visions. Ugh.

[alexpgp.livejournal.com]

Editing translations has its own set of issues.

The basic idea of translation is to read a chunk of source text, grok it, formulate a way of expressing the same thought in some other (called the "target") language, and then keyboard the result (typically, into a word processor file).

Editing requires much the same routine—read a chunk of text, grok it, formulate a translation—and then compare that formulation to what the translator came up with.

And that last little part opens a whole big can of worms, because now there are a series of judgment calls that the editor has to make regarding differences in the two formulations.

That said, good translations don't put stress on editors. Bad translations do nothing but stress the editor.

Cheers...