Progressing along...

Got home last night to find the crew out like lights, for the most part, so I waited around for a while until people regained consciousness (wrote a post, too) and then went to bed.

I got up this morning and returned dutifully to the face of the salt mine. As of this moment, I have 7 of 19 pages done. Of the remaining 12, one is a title page, another is a table of contents, and a third is the last page, which contains a 5-line bibliography and the document's colophon, all of which ought to take hardly any time at all to translate.

Following the thread of how useful the ISO standard I bought yesterday is to the translation process, I estimate I saved an additional 10 minutes today, having found several paragraphs in the ISO document that described a testing procedure that could be used almost verbatim in my translation.

But right now, I'm thinking of packing it up for a while and getting ready for work. I'm in the middle of transcribing a huge table (twelve columns, 40 lines) of numbers. While some people don't want the translator to incorporate such tables (since they don't want to pay a translation rate for it), most do, so this is a respite from having to think about what the words mean (instead, here I have to worry that the numbers I transcribe are accurate, which is a non-trivial task, seeing as adjacent numbers are very close in value, and actually take longer for me to enter than an equivalent number of text words).

The Multitran site has been down for the past several days, which has simply served to underscore just how much I've come to rely on it being there to answer most of my terminology questions. On the other hand, I'm not doing too badly using my own resources, so maybe my reliance is more from the point of view of convenience than from the quality (or quantity) of information received.

Time to go get some coffee somewhere and then get ready to go to work.

Cheers...

Waiting for dinner...

Tomorrow is pretty much the last day in orbit for the Soyuz "taxi mission" (the transfer hatch closes at 21:35 GMT), so there are not a whole lot of radiograms going up to tell them of upcoming events.

Sitting here and idly musing for a few minutes near the end of the work day, I suppose that among the most challenging radiograms Alex K. and I translated had to do with a study called "Plankton Lens," which had crew members - and South African Mark Shuttleworth in particular - spending time looking for and taking photos of particular features in the Earth's oceans. The challenge lay in accurately translating various geographical names - such as the "Flemish Cape bank," the "Gouin reservoir," and the "Betsiboka River" - and the names of various phenomena, such as "sea bloom" (цветоконтрастные образования, which one might naively translate as "color contrasting features"), "internal waves." Translating (and researching)those radiograms made me want to do a little traveling, though.

I've been reading over the Russian version of the ISO standard and comparing it to what I presume is the English original. I am a little surprised to have found what I think are a couple of translation errors, but when you consider just how hard it is to achieve perfection in this racket, the quality is actually pretty high. In any event, I did just over 2300 words at home this morning before showing up here for work. Everything seems to be on track, thus far.

Food has arrived, courtesy of Popeye's (though we pay for it, of course). Don't ask me what possessed me to order it... Having done so, however, I suppose I ought to go pick up my order.

Cheers...