Plugging away...
When client M's project manager characterized this job as "not very technical" she was, unfortunately, "not very correct."
I've compiled my usual table for the project, listing all 209 pages. I am now where I was "supposed" to be yesterday at the end of the day. Whereas yesterday, I was translating 2 or more pages per hour, this most recent section is quite heavily marinated in hard-core railroading jargon. If I can understand one sentence in 10, I'm doing well. For the rest, most have one or more arcane terms that defy all my paper dictionaries, Multitran, and which have been noted, if at all, only a handful of times on the Runet by the Ramber and Yandex search engines.
Of course, to make matters even more interesting, the project manager sent me (and everyone else) another huge "glossary" (it turns out it's largely similar to the one I got from client U a few... weeks?... ago). And the instructions are the same as what I got from the client U project manager: YOUR TRANSLATION MUST CONFORM TO THIS GLOSSARY!
There are days that I think much of what we say in this industry is said for the sake of form only, because nobody with a functioning brain can possibly think that what's being said makes any sense at all in the real world, except for the sake of form. Then again...
Glossaries are a good example. How in the name of all that's holy does one make sure one's translation conforms to a particular glossary? BY LOOKING UP EACH WORD, that's how. Unfortunately, "looking up" each word is a painfully slow process, since the medium in which the glossary is delivered - a Word file - is woefully inadequate for efficient searching.
Though I've probably addressed this before, the only approach that makes sense (and which implicitly limits the workable size of a glossary to maybe a few hundred terms for rapid turnaround work and a few thousand for long-term projects) is to read the glossary a few times, carefully. Done right, constituent terms will "pop up" in your head as you do the translation, and you can look them up if necessary.
Then there's one other little problem... internal contradictions. What happens when the meaning of the word 'blarf' is given as 'foo' in one place, and 'bar' in another (with, naturally, no indication at all that there might be a reason for this state of affairs)? Such contradictions are difficult enough to control in a glossary of a thousand or so terms, and that's if you're being careful. Imagine what happens when you have a glossary of 8300+ terms that, frankly, haven't seen a lot of linguistic elbow grease, if you know what I mean.
Oh, I could go on... and maybe some day I shall expand on this theme, with a suitable rant on the concept of "there shall be no errors in your translation!" But my heart is not into it now. My spleen has been vented... at least for the moment.
Who knows, maybe I'll be lucky and run into two comprehensible sentences in a row...
Cheers...
I've compiled my usual table for the project, listing all 209 pages. I am now where I was "supposed" to be yesterday at the end of the day. Whereas yesterday, I was translating 2 or more pages per hour, this most recent section is quite heavily marinated in hard-core railroading jargon. If I can understand one sentence in 10, I'm doing well. For the rest, most have one or more arcane terms that defy all my paper dictionaries, Multitran, and which have been noted, if at all, only a handful of times on the Runet by the Ramber and Yandex search engines.
Of course, to make matters even more interesting, the project manager sent me (and everyone else) another huge "glossary" (it turns out it's largely similar to the one I got from client U a few... weeks?... ago). And the instructions are the same as what I got from the client U project manager: YOUR TRANSLATION MUST CONFORM TO THIS GLOSSARY!
There are days that I think much of what we say in this industry is said for the sake of form only, because nobody with a functioning brain can possibly think that what's being said makes any sense at all in the real world, except for the sake of form. Then again...
Glossaries are a good example. How in the name of all that's holy does one make sure one's translation conforms to a particular glossary? BY LOOKING UP EACH WORD, that's how. Unfortunately, "looking up" each word is a painfully slow process, since the medium in which the glossary is delivered - a Word file - is woefully inadequate for efficient searching.
Though I've probably addressed this before, the only approach that makes sense (and which implicitly limits the workable size of a glossary to maybe a few hundred terms for rapid turnaround work and a few thousand for long-term projects) is to read the glossary a few times, carefully. Done right, constituent terms will "pop up" in your head as you do the translation, and you can look them up if necessary.
Then there's one other little problem... internal contradictions. What happens when the meaning of the word 'blarf' is given as 'foo' in one place, and 'bar' in another (with, naturally, no indication at all that there might be a reason for this state of affairs)? Such contradictions are difficult enough to control in a glossary of a thousand or so terms, and that's if you're being careful. Imagine what happens when you have a glossary of 8300+ terms that, frankly, haven't seen a lot of linguistic elbow grease, if you know what I mean.
Oh, I could go on... and maybe some day I shall expand on this theme, with a suitable rant on the concept of "there shall be no errors in your translation!" But my heart is not into it now. My spleen has been vented... at least for the moment.
Who knows, maybe I'll be lucky and run into two comprehensible sentences in a row...
Cheers...