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Smmmmmooth...
Dec. 20th, 2001 06:09 pmThis has actually been a pretty stress-free day, relatively speaking. I got back from the store around 10:30 or so. Caleb finally decided to return to work, and in the first hour or so there were hardly any people coming in. The Rush appears to have slackened (only people well and truly intent on spending scads of money will show up tomorrow with overnight packages).
I got a call from my California client, asking if I could do a rush 450 words or so. I could, and did. This is the same client for whom I'm doing the 170 pages, and I was pleased that he hadn't mentioned not having received the first part of the work to evaluate.
So, starting around 1:00 pm or so, I started in on the first part of the job, a 17-page article on testing bar-coded tags. The pages are short and the originator of the text appears to write clearly. I hope he wrote the rest of the material.
* * * Which reminds me of a turning point in my understanding of the nuances of Russian...
Back when I used to pound out freelance translations for Plenum Publishing Corp. (in the days when they published 140 or so Soviet technical journals in English translation), I eventually noticed that any article written by a Georgian - identifiable generally via a surname that ended in -idze, -adze, or -ishvili - would be about three orders of magnitude more turgid (and hence, much more difficult to translate) than an article written by anyone else who could get published in such journals.
As a result, I stopped volunteering to translate such articles, and life became incrementally easier.
But those articles - including the ones penned by wild men from Tbilisi - at least, were refereed, edited, and proofread. They hold no candle to some of the memorably illiterate sludge out there that passes for technical writing today, on both sides of the pond. Or, rather, today's crap holds no candle to them.
Gotta run... more later (maybe).
Cheers...
I got a call from my California client, asking if I could do a rush 450 words or so. I could, and did. This is the same client for whom I'm doing the 170 pages, and I was pleased that he hadn't mentioned not having received the first part of the work to evaluate.
So, starting around 1:00 pm or so, I started in on the first part of the job, a 17-page article on testing bar-coded tags. The pages are short and the originator of the text appears to write clearly. I hope he wrote the rest of the material.
Back when I used to pound out freelance translations for Plenum Publishing Corp. (in the days when they published 140 or so Soviet technical journals in English translation), I eventually noticed that any article written by a Georgian - identifiable generally via a surname that ended in -idze, -adze, or -ishvili - would be about three orders of magnitude more turgid (and hence, much more difficult to translate) than an article written by anyone else who could get published in such journals.
As a result, I stopped volunteering to translate such articles, and life became incrementally easier.
But those articles - including the ones penned by wild men from Tbilisi - at least, were refereed, edited, and proofread. They hold no candle to some of the memorably illiterate sludge out there that passes for technical writing today, on both sides of the pond. Or, rather, today's crap holds no candle to them.
Gotta run... more later (maybe).
Cheers...
