Home stretch...

I got home yesterday around 9 am and proceeded to start translating again; this set of articles is due Thursday afternoon, and based on what I can see, I'm in fairly good shape to complete the work on time if certain circumstances (and software products) cooperate.

I mentioned in my second post last Friday that translators live and die by the word. One clarification is in order: Although one does get paid by the word, they must ultimately be the correct words (which may not always be the case, for a number of reasons I won't go into right now).

But if translators live and die primarily by the word, then deadlines come in a close second. No, I take that back. The two are inseparable. A perfect translation that's late is often useless, and a lousy translation that's delivered on time (or even early) is less than useless. On the other hand, being consistently on time with consistently good-to-excellent work is a sure way to get repeat business.

Me, I don't worry too much about finding the right words. They come to me, and the ones I don't know... well, I've learned how to ferret out what they mean.

I do worry about deadlines, though... I hate setting them. Clients, naturally, want to have their work back as soon as possible; I want to make sure I have enough time to do a quality job and not have to put in all sorts of strange hours. When I first started doing translations full time, I recall having a "rush" rate. In the years since, though, the "rush" rate seems to have gone the way of the dinosaur. Everything is a rush, now. When it comes to setting deadlines, sometimes the client is able to force my hand; sometimes I prevail.

In the final analysis, though, the imposing aspect of a deadline is that - having set it - there's no way to manufacture more time between now and... the deadline. No time to take care of urgent, important stuff that robs you of the hours you had planned to spend making the deadline.

Case in point: I had hoped to be finished with this current series of articles by today. But I didn't get much done yesterday during the day because MS Word proceeded to get finicky on me again, crashing several times. Even saving my work after each sentence didn't really help, because I ended up having to reboot the machine after every second sentence or so. (The program typically faults out upon trying to save, and does not complete the operation before faulting. And the reboot is no joke. As a countermeasure, I tried reinstalling Windows Me, but that process gives up the ghost somewhere about 9% of the way to Nirvana, which tells me that Bad Things are happening on my eSlate.)

Anyway, with no phone and no television, it was pretty easy to focus... too bad the software did not cooperate and I ended up having to focus on the wrong thing.

I finally started to get ready for sleep around 2:15 pm, starting with a filling meal of boiled pork tenderloin, straw mushrooms, snap peas, soy sprouts, and udon noodles accompanied by a pair of Shiner bock beers. I then showered and hit the sack.

I slept pretty well, all things considered. Got up with no reluctance at 10 pm, got ready for work and left the house.

Tonight's been a fairly quiet night, but I feel more tired now than I did last night at this time.

Cheers...

Maybe the Viking was right, after all...

Just over 25 years ago (September 3, 1976), Viking 2 landed on Mars. The first Viking spacecraft had already landed on the planet six weeks earlier.

Among the experiments on these vehicles was one to test for the presence of life on Mars. That experiment suggested evidence of life on the planet. However, the results of another experiment led researchers to dismiss such a conclusion...

Until a few months ago when a microbiologist named Joe Miller, who had been studying the old numbers, announced that the data from the Viking craft showed a circadian, or daily rhythm in the readings of that first experiment.

Rocks don't exhibit circadian patterns. Organisms do.

So, NASA has done the right thing: it's posted the original data on the Web. I'm not sure the data is necessarily all that interesting, in and of itself, but the fact that it was posted is.

* * *
Home after paying off some bills (including phone). Just over 3 hours to sleep time. Gotta work.

Cheers...

A mistake...

Maybe.

About an hour after my previous post, I was noticing that I couldn't concentrate very well and that I was tired. So, I went to sleep and zonked out pretty quick.

I woke up at around 5 pm and forced myself to snooze until about a quarter to six. I might have even gone back to sleep if some idiot hadn't called... I never noticed it before, but the sound of a ringing phone - even if it is muted by an intervening wall - really has a tendency to bring me out of a drowsy state.

Like that. Almost as if I could hear my synapses snapping to attention, feel my arteries expanding to accommodate sudden increased blood flow, tune my hearing sensitivity to "high," and taste how my eyes - even behind closed lids - were becoming more alert.

Ye gods.

Once I got up, I went back to the translation and got nailed again by whatever it is that's killing Word seemingly at random. I'm getting real good at retranslating stuff... I estimate I've lost about five-six pages of text by this point. But I'm also getting real good at hitting Shift-F12 almost as often as the space bar.

Anyway, over the past couple of hours, I've managed to translate myself down to the point where I have three pages of electronic text left to do, along with seven paper pages that don't have much text, just tables, so they ought to go fairly quickly. It's a few in front of 9 pm right now, and if I work for one more hour, I might whittle the electronic part down to two pages or less. If I get all of the translation done by the time I go to sleep, um, tomorrow, that'll leave me Thursday to give the piece the once-over and send it off. (Then again, given all of the little notes I've left for myself in the text, that once-over will not be a trivial glance.)

Good thing I asked for an extra day back there at the "assignment" phase of the job. :^)

* * *
I finally figured out I need to have news as a friend, since I'm getting a little sick and tired of finding out about what's going on and what all the new features are at LJ by reading my friends' posts. (No rancor in that last sentence, 'cept maybe to wonder what took me so long.)

Frankly, I don't know how to react to the idea of being a source of invitations to join LJ. My pessimal scenario is having one of the people who's been giving LJ a hard time start pestering individual LJ members for an invitation, with such LJers then becoming the targets of rage - with everything that such rage may imply - if invitations are not immediately forthcoming. Of course, as I said, that's my pessimal (as opposed to optimal) view of the world and may well be unrealistic.

Enough goldbricking! Back to work!

Cheers..

Smooth running...

For the past hour, my computer has cooperated to a surprising extent, which has not prevented me from reinforcing the habit of saving my work every minute or so. I also broke through a turgid section of text that had gone into berserk details regarding the structure of the Tu-160 strategic bomber's airframe, and am now waltzing - relatively speaking - through a section on the airplane's power plant (NK-35 engines, yada-yada-etc.).

After having experienced numerous software crashes over the past few days, I'd noticed (or imagined) that one of the factors that "encourages" Word to crash is doing a word count. In the fine tradition of software nerds everywhere, I therefore started avoiding doing word counts (which may account for the sudden "cooperation," but then again, I may be wrong). I did one a few minutes ago, though, after saving my work for the night. It turns out I have 887 words left of electronic text, which is just peachy.

Off to freshen up for the upcoming "day" of work, which starts in... just under two hours.

Cheers...