Here, fix "this"...

I had a bad feeling about client T's job when it was described over the phone ("please edit this translation that was done in Russia"). Here's why, quoting the first two paragraphs of the document:

This handout material is designed for visiting crews and its purpose is to give appropriate to their preparation level knowledge.

There is no such system as C&W system but we artificially emphasize it to understand the operation of the systems in regard with the caution and warning signalization. It is a complex system because it includes much ore less the elements of different onboard systems.

Understand, I'm not knocking Russian translators. It's clear that no Russian translator ever came near this document, as it has all of the hallmarks of a machine translation.

I suppose I should not complain, really. The more people translate via machine, the more work for people like me. It's clear that this document is not editable, i.e., it would be easier to start from scratch and retranslate it.

But it's hard to convince clients that this has to be done. Primo, they've got a deadline, and segundo, they've got a budget. On the other hand, I've got the translation equivalent of a sow's ear on my hands, and I, too, have deadlines and budgets, and turning this assignment into a silk purse doesn't fit in with either one.

As the doctor said when I was born, "It may get ugly..."

Cheers...

P.S. Update at 12:07 pm: The client concurred with my assessment. The job is a translation. Now, all I gotta do is actually do it.

When in doubt, dance with your log files...

I've been ftp'ing files back and forth between my Windows desktop and my Linux box, but ultimately, that's a pretty tedious process. Once, a long time ago, I got samba to run on a Linux box or, more accurately, I got it to run so that I could access my files from the Network Neighborhood on my Windows box.

Well, I went ahead and braved the documentation and tried to get samba to run again, similarly, on 'onegin'. The problem was that I kept getting asked for a password on my Windows screen. The question in my mind was: "A password for what?" How is the Linux box going to know who I am?

It turns out that the user name is whatever name you log into Windows with. If it's not the same as your user name on the Linux box, you're supposed to create a mapping file with a line in it that says: Linux_user_name = Windows_user_name. (Those underbars imply that both user names are one string of characters, with no embedded white space.)

I had to play around a bit, since my Windows user name has a space in it (four, actually). Thus, the above formula needs to be tweaked a little to look like: Linux_user_name = "Windows user name" (the quotes are significant).

I never would have figured this all out, BTW, if I hadn't taken a look at the samba log file. Hooray for log files!

With jubilation out of the way, I then read on advogato (via /.) that Microsoft has just released a version of its CIFS standard whose license prohibits implementations of the standard in any software that Microsoft defines as an "IPR Impairing License" (e.g., the GPL). Samba turns out to be such an implementation, so it's not at all clear what might happen, here.

* * *Between running around at Mach 3 with my hair on fire today and trying to settle down and translate, I've got a little more than 3 pages of the work for client R left to do. After taking a closer look, it turns out that the work for client S will not take too long. (I did two of four files today, and the remaining two files don't have a lot of words in them.) The third item on my plate - the machine translation that I wrote about this morning - turns out to be a relatively short document, too (what gives it mass are the illustrations).

So it may turn out that I'll be able to take care of all these items on Sunday, which is the last day of the season at the ski center (or so I'm told by Drew, who intends to make the most of it).

Cheers...