Saved by the editor...

The editor of the ATA Chronicle did me a huge favor by asking me to submit an article on export controls, which is something I'd signed up to talk about at the association's annual conference. You see, I am one of those people who generally waits until The Last Minute™ to put together articles, presentations, etc., and had I done so in this case, I might well have ended up with egg on my face.

My first encounter with export controls occurred in 1991, as I was preparing to join fellow marketers from software publisher Borland International on a trip to Moscow to attend one of the first Western-style computer trade shows in post-Communist Russia. As all of us Borlanders depended on having a computer at hand to do our work, we were quite prepared to tote our laptops along with us to check our e-mail from Moscow. Ready, that is, until the word came down from the company's legal department: Since our laptops contained certain hardware chips (chief among which was the 80386 microprocessor, a direct ancestor of today's Pentium), an export license would be required in order to legally go to Russia with the machines.

The unofficial buzz concerning the requirement had to do with a strong desire on the part of the U.S. Government to keep 80386 processors from ending up, for example, as part of guidance systems on unfriendly ICBMs. In any event, as nobody was sure just how long it would take to get such licenses, and as time was short, we all left our machines at home in California.

I next came upon the subject of export controls in the mid-1990s, while following the saga of an application called Pretty Good Privacy. PGP, as it's called, is a program that can be used to securely encrypt computer files and e-mail, as well as "sign" documents with a tamper-proof digital signature (to prevent forgery and unauthorized modification). It was first released to the world in 1991 and was quickly disseminated over computer bulletin board systems (BBS) and the Internet, becoming a popular standard for e-mail encryption.

(And yes, that's where the 'PGP' comes from in my LJ name... it's a long-ish story.)

It turns out, however, that cryptographic software was controlled under the International Trade in Arms Regulations, where it was classified as a "munition." Because PGP crossed the U.S. border via the Internet, the program's author - one Phil Zimmermann - was made the target of a federal criminal investigation to determine whether he had violated the export control laws. The investigation was closed without indictment in January 1996.

Export control appeared on my personal radar a third time, during my employment in Houston. It became an important issue at NASA (and, I've learned, at other government agencies and laboratories), to the extent that everyone had to become conversant in the basics, including things such as the "Entities" list (outfits that are believed to be "into" proliferation of mass desctruction weapons) and the "Denied Persons" list (more a list of countries, such as Lybia and Iran, to which you couldn't export certain hardware or technical data).

So you could have slapped me down with a wet noodle when I came to find - in researching the article - that the regulations have been changed, enough to where most translators (and even most technical translators) really won't find themselves under the shadow of enforcement in their day-to-day work.

Of course, I could be wrong about that, but I think it's clear that an article addressed to translators is not going to have the "punch" that it would have had, say, two years ago.

Looks like I owe the editor a short note, and I probably ought to withdraw my presentation as well.

* * *The kids came over around lunch time to pick up more stuff, and we all sat down and had an impromptu meal. Huntur is developing new skills every day. I only wish I had a camera to capture the look on her face when I took a deck of cards and made them jump in a cascade from hand to hand. It wasn't so much that she was startled, I think, as it was that she could not figure how the cards (one of which she was holding in her hand) could move like that.

* * *I finally got Trados to behave yesterday, and actually used it to process one of the Excel files that arrived on Friday. Unlike Déjà Vu or SDLX, where exact matches can be propagated automatically through a document, I ended up having to process each cell of the spreadsheet individually (and there was a lot of repetition). While the process was slower than, say, doing a global search-and-replace, it was still faster than typing each entry by hand, and I was able to make sure that each cell was translated. (Of course, there may very well be a way to autopropagate translations from the application's translation memory, but if there is, I did not find it.)

* * *Galina and I went over to Doug and Kat's house for a game of Cashflow. I drew the airline pilot's card, which gave me a high salary and high expenses. I don't so much mind getting such cards, as it is a challenge to find the strategy that might work in such a case to achieve the game's goal (passive income exceeding expenses). I ended up getting perhaps 25% of the way to that goal before someone else won the game.

Afterward, we all sat around and shot the breeze, offering advice to one of our number whose dream is to be an artist and who is caught between pursuing an established floor installation and maintenance business and helping his wife with her graphics design business. I don't really understand why, but the post-game banter did a magnificent job of depressing me.

* * *Besides the Excel file, I also finished the third State Standard document earlier this evening. I'll give it a look-over tomorrow when I get up and then send it and the translated Excel file to the client.

Taking the article off my plate, by the way, is a great load off my shoulders.

Cheers...