![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Blue skies...
Aug. 25th, 2002 07:46 pmWell, if it weren't for the work piled on my desk and the fact that Galina probably got a light case of food poisoning yesterday that lasted all night and into the day... this could almost be called the perfect Sunday.
As it was, I intended to sleep in, but habit (and Ming Toy) conspired to raise me from a reasonably sound sleep at 7:15 this morning. Galina was not in the mood for coffee, or anything else for that matter. I made myself some breakfast and then took care of a few chores before hitting the translation floor at full speed at around 9 or so.
An hour later, I was where I wanted to be at the close of the work day yesterday. At 1 pm, I took a break to go upstairs and prepare another mushroom soup, this one with potatoes, carrots, celery, etc. The mushroom component is starting to increasingly come from a bag of dried shiitake mushrooms I bought in Houston during one of my work trips.
(Talking about work trips, I need to start a process going this week regarding confirmation of my Kazakhstan gig.)
* * * The physics job for client T was done using Trados, and with the exception of a couple of minor glitches, the whole process went amazingly well. I even managed to save my work a few minutes before Word threw one of its famous "Oops! You're screwed!" error messages that cause the application to stop dead in its tracks while your (immortal, natch) text goes the way of the sabre-toothed tiger.
My project manager at T called to see how I was doing just as I was finishing my first pass through the work. When I told him I was just about done (he's worried the editor won't have enough time to give it their once-over before the thing is due), he said, "You know, I think you're the only person in the world who could have done a translation of this difficulty within the deadline I gave you."
I'm sure he's wrong about that, but it was nice to hear, certainly. Whenever I hear people praising my speed, though, I flinch a little, because while "fast" work does not automatically mean "bad quality" work, there are a lot of people out there (translators, almost exclusively), who simply love to draw generalizations like that, particularly if certain people happen to be the subject of the conversation. (The other common generalization is that "cheap" work is automatically "bad quality work," at any speed.)
The funny thing is that if you ease up on the "automatic" aspect of these formulations and replace them with "tends to be" (or words to that effect), the generalizations hold. People who work fast tend to generate poorer quality work than people who take their time. Similarly, people who work for a penny or two per word also tend to output poor quality work.
Of course, this implies "all other things being equal," which they almost never are.
In my case, I've got a non-translation writing background, including a couple of books and several hundred magazine articles. When I know what I want to say, it generally does not take me long to express myself. A fortunate education left me with fairly good grammar and spelling. I read a lot, too.
As far as "cheap" is concerned, I've done that, too. There was a time I worked for 2.2 cents per word, and if truth be told, the translations I churned out at that rate were... shall we say... "not polished." Then again, it may well be that such quality was not so much the result of a desire to make more money faster, as it was a result of the fact that I was not a very experienced translator (nor were there many convenient references out there - my one-and-only good dictionary was a first edition Callaham's).
I learned to translate, in those first years, by reading literally millions of words of translations done by others. Some of it rubbed off, apparently.
Moreover, I've met (and worked with) excellent translators who - for reasons unknown - seem to be satisfied working at 3 or 4 cents a word. I think the main reason may be isolation, because as soon as they realize what kind of price they could command for their level of talent, their client list changes dramatically.
Anyway... I'm going to go see if I can catch some of the last of that daylight out there.
Cheers...
As it was, I intended to sleep in, but habit (and Ming Toy) conspired to raise me from a reasonably sound sleep at 7:15 this morning. Galina was not in the mood for coffee, or anything else for that matter. I made myself some breakfast and then took care of a few chores before hitting the translation floor at full speed at around 9 or so.
An hour later, I was where I wanted to be at the close of the work day yesterday. At 1 pm, I took a break to go upstairs and prepare another mushroom soup, this one with potatoes, carrots, celery, etc. The mushroom component is starting to increasingly come from a bag of dried shiitake mushrooms I bought in Houston during one of my work trips.
(Talking about work trips, I need to start a process going this week regarding confirmation of my Kazakhstan gig.)
My project manager at T called to see how I was doing just as I was finishing my first pass through the work. When I told him I was just about done (he's worried the editor won't have enough time to give it their once-over before the thing is due), he said, "You know, I think you're the only person in the world who could have done a translation of this difficulty within the deadline I gave you."
I'm sure he's wrong about that, but it was nice to hear, certainly. Whenever I hear people praising my speed, though, I flinch a little, because while "fast" work does not automatically mean "bad quality" work, there are a lot of people out there (translators, almost exclusively), who simply love to draw generalizations like that, particularly if certain people happen to be the subject of the conversation. (The other common generalization is that "cheap" work is automatically "bad quality work," at any speed.)
The funny thing is that if you ease up on the "automatic" aspect of these formulations and replace them with "tends to be" (or words to that effect), the generalizations hold. People who work fast tend to generate poorer quality work than people who take their time. Similarly, people who work for a penny or two per word also tend to output poor quality work.
Of course, this implies "all other things being equal," which they almost never are.
In my case, I've got a non-translation writing background, including a couple of books and several hundred magazine articles. When I know what I want to say, it generally does not take me long to express myself. A fortunate education left me with fairly good grammar and spelling. I read a lot, too.
As far as "cheap" is concerned, I've done that, too. There was a time I worked for 2.2 cents per word, and if truth be told, the translations I churned out at that rate were... shall we say... "not polished." Then again, it may well be that such quality was not so much the result of a desire to make more money faster, as it was a result of the fact that I was not a very experienced translator (nor were there many convenient references out there - my one-and-only good dictionary was a first edition Callaham's).
I learned to translate, in those first years, by reading literally millions of words of translations done by others. Some of it rubbed off, apparently.
Moreover, I've met (and worked with) excellent translators who - for reasons unknown - seem to be satisfied working at 3 or 4 cents a word. I think the main reason may be isolation, because as soon as they realize what kind of price they could command for their level of talent, their client list changes dramatically.
Anyway... I'm going to go see if I can catch some of the last of that daylight out there.
Cheers...
