Role-playing on the porch...

When I got home last night, there were a number of cars parked in front of the house and a long table had been constructed on our porch. Lee and her friends were there, playing Dungeons and Dragons.

I went inside, cooked dinner, had a couple of beers, and finished the Parker book, the story to which ended satisfactorily, if a bit quickly. I then surfed the net for a little bit and went to bed.

This morning, the D&D crew was still at it, so I showered quickly and left to go to the MCC, showing up for work 3 hours early to work on the assignment that Lev gave me on Thursday.

The document is a 3200-word piece on installing panel sections in the FGB, and it's a good thing I started to work on it now. Over the past three hours, I've done a little more than half of the job, so I'll probably have to repeat this go-to-work-early tactic tomorrow, seeing as how it's due back to Lev pretty much first thing in the morning on Monday.

In the meantime, Alex K. and I have only got 5 radiograms so far in our inbox, but in translating the Form 24 for the 30th, Alex found and replaced 40 instances of references to separate radiograms. Now, lots of those references probably duplicate themselves, but it's entirely possible we have not seen the peak of radiogram fever. A significant number of those I have seen over the past couple of days seem to consist only of corrections and amplifications to crew procedures that were written, I presume, under time pressure. We'll see how this progresses.

In the meantime, it is time to "turn to" and do some radiograms.

Cheers...

Bliss is fleeting...

Alex K.'s and my tranquility was shattered around 2 pm when the Ops Planners announced that an additional 8 radiograms had been dropped in our inbox.

Whee!

The long and short of it is that we finished the work and got the heck out of there by 8 pm (Alex staying over his designated end time of 5 pm).

Working with Alex is a humbling experience, to a certain extent. He is a semi-permanent fixture at Execute Package, and thus has had the time to research a lot of the esoterica that goes into various radiograms, many of which keep reappearing periodically.

Like most Russians, he is tremendouly opinionated, but since I'm an agreeable kind of fellow, this is not a big deal. In any event, I find that reserving my arguments for the items that really matter seems to lend them some additional credibility, so that when I do disagree with Alex, he generally goes along with my point of view.

I can't tell whether his changes to my work are done for the sake of change or what. As an aside, such changes are an occupational hazard among translators who edit. The key to editing is to leave stuff alone if it's not wrong, and to correct it if it is. Sometimes making corrections is easy, as when a translator misunderstands something and writes "off" where "on" is intended. At other times, it's a judgment call, and more often than not, it's not necessary at all.

I recall, back when I worked in the office in Houston, one editor who never met a sentence she wouldn't rewrite. Moreover, woe to anyone who tried to discuss such changes! Every change, according to her, had a specific purpose and was absolutely, irrefutably essential to the text. (Clearly a nut case, as one of her edits, if memory serves, was to change "X was born in Moscow in 1921" to "X was born in 1921 in Moscow.")

Alex's changes are, for the most part, not essential in my view. Certainly his changes make my work more consistent with his, and his phraseology often sounds better than mine (although my text, he says, is absolutely correct), but I can't help but feel a certain knot in my stomach sitting by and watching him edit my work. I look at it as an learning experience.

There are times, though, I think he goes beyond the bounds of what we, as translators, may do in a document, regardless of our level of knowledge.

Too, I've checked his work and found the occasional lapse. None of us are perfect, but we can all aspire.

* * *So I get home and - I know this is probably hard to believe - the D&D crew is still hard at it. (Moreover, I get the feeling that we are nowhere near any kind of record for this type of behavior.)

Ah, well.

Pizza has been ordered, and I am sitting here downing my second "Red Dog" beer.

* * *I went through some papers I brought down with me and found the letter complaining about the moldy house. It's from the POA I visited on Friday (the one that said I was paid up and there were no outstanding complaints about our property). That lifts a weight from my shoulders.

In any event, the pizza is on its way, and I have keyboarded enough for the day.

Cheers...