Regression is good...

One of the side-effects of doing this geophysics translation is that it makes me aware of just how much time I've spent doing aerospace (and how relatively easy it had become). Whereas I often was able to put down several paragraphs of aerospace translation without picking up a dictionary, I now find myself not only looking up words in every sentence, but cross-checking among dictionaries, which sometimes gives me different terms and a whole different kind of headache.

The availability of the Internet is not something I had when I last freelanced. (Actually, there was an Internet, powered by things such as gopher and WAIS, but I digress...) The huge amount of information made available by the Internet makes the translator's life simultaneously easier and harder. It's easier, because you can find the answers to all sorts of questions relatively quickly, and it's harder because clients expect all those sorts of questions to be answered. There was a time you could let an unknown acronym or abbreviation stand because you hadn't the resources to look it up or the time to ask questions. Now, you have to at least try to resolve the issue, that is, if you want to distinguish yourself from the mass of competitors who haven't a clue or don't care.

Galina and I just took a 90 minute break from our respective duties, and I am taking a short additional break to key in this post. In the five hours I've worked thus far today, I've put down about 2500 words, which is less than what I am accustomed to doing. Then again, I am accustomed to aerospace text, so I can't kick all that much.

One thing is for sure, if I linger here, no work gets done there. Gotta go...

Cheers...