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... but I mean the HOME STRETCH!
Jan. 27th, 2002 09:26 amI did six and a half pages last night and decided to take a rest, suggesting to Drew that we might watch Seven Samurai together. He made all the right assenting sounds, but it never happened, as he had to go down the road (he said) to help a friend out with a computer problem. I suspect he was just not too enthused about a 40-year old, black-and-white film featuring strange-looking people speaking a strange language interpreted by subtitles at the bottom of the screen.
Anyway, I went upstairs to watch some teevee, with nothing but a second bowl of my cock-a-leekie soup to console myself with (Drew and I had each had a bowl earlier and pronounced the product good; I think I'll keep the recipe). I kept switching between Thirteenth Floor and The Fifth Element most of the time, though I did manage to catch bits and pieces of Heartbreak Ridge (an underrated movie, in my opinion) and the final 10 minutes or so of an old Zorro episode on the Disney Channel.
I got up a couple of hours ago and decided, on a whim, to do a quick cleanup of some of the more obvious outrages in the house. 'twas a good thing, too, as Galina walked in around 7:30, just after I'd finished my sweep.
I'm so glad she's home. (If I had a tail, it'd be wagging!)
* * * A few of the pages I did last night went smoothly, some others went very slowly. Sometimes the cause of the slowdown was new terminology (which ain't fair, as I'm in the appendices :^), and sometimes the cause was a creative typographical error.
There were two such errors in this one "sparse" table that ended my evening (I use the term to denote a table that has a little text and a lot of numbers, which should go very quickly, but did not in this case).
In the first case, a column was headed by the tag "расстояние между лями, м" which means "distance between 'лями', in meters." Dictionary searches for the missing word yielded nothing; online searches failed, too.
But the online search did show that a number of words, when declined appropriately, end in "лями." If I assumed that these four letters were the end of "профиль" (profile) declined in the instrumental plural (профилями), then everything made sense (especially since "профиль" appeared in the next column, declined in the dative singular).
The next one required a query to ProZ. It had to do with some kind of surveying, described as "хинное просвечивание." Based on my experience with the previous example, I suspected that the first part of some word had been deleted from the text. My problem was: what word?
It turns out that "хинное" in Russian carries the flavor of "quinine," if you'll pardon my turn of the phrase. I doubted very seriously that anyone uses quinine when doing soil analysis (except, perhaps, mixed with gin and applied internally to commiserate one's lot in life). Nonetheless, I got a couple of suggestions along those lines.
One respondent suggested that perhaps the adjective part of the survey name was someone's proper name, e.g., Quinn, and gave some fairly good supporting evidence (albeit the work this fellow Quinn does doesn't quite fit in with my subject).
Finally, one of the ProZ veterans came up with the missing piece. My "хинное" should probably be "жинное," in which case the likely content of the cell was "межскважинное просвечивание," which in English is "crosshole survey." When I read that, a little gong went off in my head, as there had been mention of such surveys in the main body of the document.
Anyway, I still have a bunch of work to do, and this post is beginning to develop the aroma of procrastination.
Cheers...
Anyway, I went upstairs to watch some teevee, with nothing but a second bowl of my cock-a-leekie soup to console myself with (Drew and I had each had a bowl earlier and pronounced the product good; I think I'll keep the recipe). I kept switching between Thirteenth Floor and The Fifth Element most of the time, though I did manage to catch bits and pieces of Heartbreak Ridge (an underrated movie, in my opinion) and the final 10 minutes or so of an old Zorro episode on the Disney Channel.
I got up a couple of hours ago and decided, on a whim, to do a quick cleanup of some of the more obvious outrages in the house. 'twas a good thing, too, as Galina walked in around 7:30, just after I'd finished my sweep.
I'm so glad she's home. (If I had a tail, it'd be wagging!)
There were two such errors in this one "sparse" table that ended my evening (I use the term to denote a table that has a little text and a lot of numbers, which should go very quickly, but did not in this case).
In the first case, a column was headed by the tag "расстояние между лями, м" which means "distance between 'лями', in meters." Dictionary searches for the missing word yielded nothing; online searches failed, too.
But the online search did show that a number of words, when declined appropriately, end in "лями." If I assumed that these four letters were the end of "профиль" (profile) declined in the instrumental plural (профилями), then everything made sense (especially since "профиль" appeared in the next column, declined in the dative singular).
The next one required a query to ProZ. It had to do with some kind of surveying, described as "хинное просвечивание." Based on my experience with the previous example, I suspected that the first part of some word had been deleted from the text. My problem was: what word?
It turns out that "хинное" in Russian carries the flavor of "quinine," if you'll pardon my turn of the phrase. I doubted very seriously that anyone uses quinine when doing soil analysis (except, perhaps, mixed with gin and applied internally to commiserate one's lot in life). Nonetheless, I got a couple of suggestions along those lines.
One respondent suggested that perhaps the adjective part of the survey name was someone's proper name, e.g., Quinn, and gave some fairly good supporting evidence (albeit the work this fellow Quinn does doesn't quite fit in with my subject).
Finally, one of the ProZ veterans came up with the missing piece. My "хинное" should probably be "жинное," in which case the likely content of the cell was "межскважинное просвечивание," which in English is "crosshole survey." When I read that, a little gong went off in my head, as there had been mention of such surveys in the main body of the document.
Anyway, I still have a bunch of work to do, and this post is beginning to develop the aroma of procrastination.
Cheers...
