St. Jerome's Day...

While ordinarily not an observer of saints' namesdays, I have the pleasure of informing you, dear reader, that translators the world over - or at least a healthy portion of them - have symbolically installed St. Jerome (who is reputed to have done Wonderful Things, linguistically, and who died peacefully on 30 September 420) as the patron saint of translators.

Know, then, that today - September 30 - is Translator's Day.

With this knowledge and a couple of dollars, one can doubtless buy a Sunday paper in many metropolitan centers in this great nation of ours.

Pardon me while I go get some morning coffee. Afterward, I shall honor the name of Jerome by finishing the rush assignment that's due tomorrow morning.

Cheers...

Why St. Jerome?

So, in between paragraphs on how pollutants are to be monitored at the facility for which I'm translating the document, I became curious: just why, exactly, is St. Jerome considered the patron saint of translators?

I found a possible explanation (tongue planted squarely in my cheek) at James Kiefer's Christian Biographies site, wherein it is said, in an article devoted to Jerome:

Jerome was intemperate in controversy, and any correspondence with him tended to degenerate into a flame war.

I'd love to drop that line on the Lantra-L mailing list (which is - what else - a translator's mailing list), but then again, take another look at the quote!

Actually, without doing a lot of research, it seems Jerome translated the Bible into Latin (not Old Latin, but the Latin spoken and written by the Latin-speakers of his day, known as the Vulgate Latin, or the 'Latin of the common people'), which is no mean accomplishment. From that article:

Vulgate Latin is classical Latin in the first stages of evolving into such modern languages as Spanish, French, and Italian. It has begun the process of changing from an inflected language (in which words have various endings, or inflections, which are used to show the relation of the word to other words in the sentence) to a separate-word language like English (in which additional words, such as prepositions, are used, along with word order, to show the function of the word). Thus, in classical Latin, "He spoke to me," is DIXIT MIHI or MIHI DIXIT, but in Vulgate Latin it is DIXIT AD ME.

What is notable, perhaps, about Jerome's scholarship in translation was his determination to master Hebrew, so that he could translate from that language, and not have to rely on the Greek translation from the Hebrew. At any rate, it's an interesting article.

Back to work. Not counting the individual pages I have to do, there are just over 1500 words left to translate in the main document.

Cheers...

Done!

It is about 3 pm.

I've completed the first pass through the assignment, I think. I found the supplemental pages appear to be identical to pages from the main document, but the proof of that will come when I do a down-and-dirty comparison to make sure all the details are there.

I will take a break of a couple of hours, to let the neurons cool down, and then return to do a QA pass through the work (read, spell check, compare against the original, etc.). I ought to be finished in time for dinner.

Cheers...

Extreme computing...

Not really.

But my seemingly endless attempts to get X to work under Mandrake 8.0 appear to have borne fruit.

Don't ask me how. All I know is that I switched from version 4-dot-something back to version 3-dot-something and ran XFdrake and Xconfigurator a lot. That, combined with the SVGA server I mentioned a while back and probably some blind dumb luck gave me a machine that, um, works.

My first official act will be to make a copy of the configuration file.

Just in case.

On other fronts, since the deadline for the translation is 9 am EDT tomorrow, I thought I'd avoid the rush and send it off tonight. It's gone, leaving me breathless with anticipation as to what tomorrow is going to bring (did she really say "3,000 words"?), not to mention the pleasure associated with cutting an invoice for this weekend's work.

Watched the fifth installment of Band of Brothers, and liked it.

Huntur is beginning to turn over from the supine position, lacking just that last oomph to make it to the prone position. Also, she is beginning to sit up from a semi-reclining position, almost with no help at all. It's really something to see how intent an infant is on accomplishing such milestones!

Time to turn in, or thereabouts.

Cheers...