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It has been a long day and promises to be a short night.
The buses depart from the hotel at 5:00 am sharp for the long trip to the site from which the Russian delegation will view the launch of STS-106. Assuming the weather cooperates - thunderheads have been swaggering back and forth across the area for several days now and the pad took a lightning strike a couple of nights ago - this will be my first up-close experience at a Shuttle launch. I am looking forward to it.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The Russian Deputy Safety Manager and I left for the KSC Industrial Area at 6:15 this morning. We were held up for a few minutes by an open drawbridge, and finally arrived at the Operations & Checkout (O&C) building shortly before 7. The hour was early enough to require headlights on road vehicles, and the stream of oncoming traffic was so steady that the lights exerted an almost hypnotic effect, and I really had to concentrate on driving. I have not seen such a steady, long stream of cars in quite a while.
Once in work mode, the idea was to quickly dispose of the outstanding paperwork associated with this one particular experiment that involves a liquid-nitrogen filled container, and then to observe as the actual container was prepared, sealed, and packed for loading aboard the Shuttle. Everything eventually got done, but it took a tad more time than anyone had initially expected.
The joint space program runs on a layer of paper "lubricant" in the form of meeting summaries, called "protocols." A transliteration of the Russian word protokol, which typically carries the meaning of "meeting minutes," a protocol is more than a summary of who said what. In the context of the program, it is a summary document that states what, exactly, the two sides agreed to and - where necessary - what they agreed to disagree on. Virtually every meeting generates a protocol, though no meeting is actually required to draw one up. At times, these protocols seem to me to express an almost contractual level of commitment on the part of the signatories. Not surprisingly, nobody takes signing a protocol lightly.
At issue this morning was a draft protocol proposed by the Russian side and faxed from Moscow overnight to several numbers, two at JSC and one that I obtained from an outfit called CallWave, which - among other services - offers free fax numbers to people who register for their FaxWave service. Since time was going to be at a premium (unlike most situations in life, the paperwork here had to be finished before anything else could proceed), and since the fax could be expected to arrive only after 1 am local time (precluding my getting it from the hotel reception desk, which closes from 11 pm to 7 am), I felt this was the best shot at getting the document translated before leaving for KSC in the morning. My call was right on the money, and the FaxWave service came through like a champ. The fax images had been sent to an e-mail address I designated, and I opened the page images this morning using fax viewer freeware.
A lot of people assume that modern translators use machine translation programs to do their work. Some do, but such folks don't last long in this business. Machine translation programs are currently at the state where you might be able to tell (approximately) what the subject of a passage is and get the gist of what is being said, but the state of the art falls far short of what people expect in a translation. If you want to see what I mean, try the following: Use your favorite method to find a translation site on the Internet. Translate a short passage, say, from English into Spanish. Then take the result and pass it through the other way, from Spanish into English. Often, just this exercise will yield hilarious results.
At any rate, if I may be permitted to plagiarize, blend, and paraphrase the marketing tag lines from a couple of financial services company, I'd say that "good translators translate things the old fashioned way ... one word at a time." By hand.
Fortunately, I'm pretty good at what I do, so - having gotten up a few minutes before I had to - I completed a preliminary draft of the translation by the time we left, and both sides were able to fairly quickly iron out differences in the course of a phone call that linked Moscow, Houston, and KSC. The paperwork was completed shortly after 9 am, and we went upstairs to watch the experiment undergo a process called "closeout."
The process itself is no big deal. Everyone is very careful to observe all the safety rules (spilling liquid nitrogen on yourself will ruin your day) and the procedure actually is pretty straightforward, as it consists of executing a set of detailed step-by-step procedures that have been worked out (and rehearsed) in painstaking detail. Once all the screws were in place (and wired so they would not inadvertently loosen), the computer guy hooked up the sensors and followed a separate procedure to initialize the data logging device that goes up with the experiment.
(I happened to notice, looking over this fellow's shoulder, that the program used to connect to the data logger had the look and feel of having been written in Turbo Vision, which is one of the products I shepherded back when I was a product manager at Borland.)
Finally, the whole shebang was placed in a container called a "locker," which was carefully wrapped in a naugahyde case that had velcro closures and then carried out on a litter that resembled a junior version of something used to carry royal persons about in ancient times.
Throughout the process, folks kept snapping away with every sort of camera, myself included. I find it notable that I've taken no pictures of anything else, really, while I've been here, except for a shot taken from the beach next to the hotel looking northward toward the space center and the launch facilities there.
Upon returning to the hotel, I grabbed a quick nap and took care of some calls for interpretation support. Then, in the evening, a group comprised of astronauts, cosmonauts, trainers, and training managers (and us interpreters) went over to a local Greek restaurant for dinner.
Over some surprisingly good food and drink, the group eventually got around to proposing a series of toasts, turning the event into the nicest kind of mutual admiration society. Someone even put in a good word about the vital role played by the linguists in the program. None of the other patrons paid any attention to us.
Anyway, it's just after 10 pm and in order for the buses to depart successfully (defined as: with everyone aboard) at 5 am, I'll be getting up at 3:30 am. That means I have to get to sleep soon if I am to be functional at all tomorrow morning. Good night.
Pray for good weather.
Cheers...
The buses depart from the hotel at 5:00 am sharp for the long trip to the site from which the Russian delegation will view the launch of STS-106. Assuming the weather cooperates - thunderheads have been swaggering back and forth across the area for several days now and the pad took a lightning strike a couple of nights ago - this will be my first up-close experience at a Shuttle launch. I am looking forward to it.
But I am getting ahead of myself.
The Russian Deputy Safety Manager and I left for the KSC Industrial Area at 6:15 this morning. We were held up for a few minutes by an open drawbridge, and finally arrived at the Operations & Checkout (O&C) building shortly before 7. The hour was early enough to require headlights on road vehicles, and the stream of oncoming traffic was so steady that the lights exerted an almost hypnotic effect, and I really had to concentrate on driving. I have not seen such a steady, long stream of cars in quite a while.
Once in work mode, the idea was to quickly dispose of the outstanding paperwork associated with this one particular experiment that involves a liquid-nitrogen filled container, and then to observe as the actual container was prepared, sealed, and packed for loading aboard the Shuttle. Everything eventually got done, but it took a tad more time than anyone had initially expected.
The joint space program runs on a layer of paper "lubricant" in the form of meeting summaries, called "protocols." A transliteration of the Russian word protokol, which typically carries the meaning of "meeting minutes," a protocol is more than a summary of who said what. In the context of the program, it is a summary document that states what, exactly, the two sides agreed to and - where necessary - what they agreed to disagree on. Virtually every meeting generates a protocol, though no meeting is actually required to draw one up. At times, these protocols seem to me to express an almost contractual level of commitment on the part of the signatories. Not surprisingly, nobody takes signing a protocol lightly.
At issue this morning was a draft protocol proposed by the Russian side and faxed from Moscow overnight to several numbers, two at JSC and one that I obtained from an outfit called CallWave, which - among other services - offers free fax numbers to people who register for their FaxWave service. Since time was going to be at a premium (unlike most situations in life, the paperwork here had to be finished before anything else could proceed), and since the fax could be expected to arrive only after 1 am local time (precluding my getting it from the hotel reception desk, which closes from 11 pm to 7 am), I felt this was the best shot at getting the document translated before leaving for KSC in the morning. My call was right on the money, and the FaxWave service came through like a champ. The fax images had been sent to an e-mail address I designated, and I opened the page images this morning using fax viewer freeware.
A lot of people assume that modern translators use machine translation programs to do their work. Some do, but such folks don't last long in this business. Machine translation programs are currently at the state where you might be able to tell (approximately) what the subject of a passage is and get the gist of what is being said, but the state of the art falls far short of what people expect in a translation. If you want to see what I mean, try the following: Use your favorite method to find a translation site on the Internet. Translate a short passage, say, from English into Spanish. Then take the result and pass it through the other way, from Spanish into English. Often, just this exercise will yield hilarious results.
At any rate, if I may be permitted to plagiarize, blend, and paraphrase the marketing tag lines from a couple of financial services company, I'd say that "good translators translate things the old fashioned way ... one word at a time." By hand.
Fortunately, I'm pretty good at what I do, so - having gotten up a few minutes before I had to - I completed a preliminary draft of the translation by the time we left, and both sides were able to fairly quickly iron out differences in the course of a phone call that linked Moscow, Houston, and KSC. The paperwork was completed shortly after 9 am, and we went upstairs to watch the experiment undergo a process called "closeout."
The process itself is no big deal. Everyone is very careful to observe all the safety rules (spilling liquid nitrogen on yourself will ruin your day) and the procedure actually is pretty straightforward, as it consists of executing a set of detailed step-by-step procedures that have been worked out (and rehearsed) in painstaking detail. Once all the screws were in place (and wired so they would not inadvertently loosen), the computer guy hooked up the sensors and followed a separate procedure to initialize the data logging device that goes up with the experiment.
(I happened to notice, looking over this fellow's shoulder, that the program used to connect to the data logger had the look and feel of having been written in Turbo Vision, which is one of the products I shepherded back when I was a product manager at Borland.)
Finally, the whole shebang was placed in a container called a "locker," which was carefully wrapped in a naugahyde case that had velcro closures and then carried out on a litter that resembled a junior version of something used to carry royal persons about in ancient times.
Throughout the process, folks kept snapping away with every sort of camera, myself included. I find it notable that I've taken no pictures of anything else, really, while I've been here, except for a shot taken from the beach next to the hotel looking northward toward the space center and the launch facilities there.
Upon returning to the hotel, I grabbed a quick nap and took care of some calls for interpretation support. Then, in the evening, a group comprised of astronauts, cosmonauts, trainers, and training managers (and us interpreters) went over to a local Greek restaurant for dinner.
Over some surprisingly good food and drink, the group eventually got around to proposing a series of toasts, turning the event into the nicest kind of mutual admiration society. Someone even put in a good word about the vital role played by the linguists in the program. None of the other patrons paid any attention to us.
Anyway, it's just after 10 pm and in order for the buses to depart successfully (defined as: with everyone aboard) at 5 am, I'll be getting up at 3:30 am. That means I have to get to sleep soon if I am to be functional at all tomorrow morning. Good night.
Pray for good weather.
Cheers...
