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I was hoodwinked into coming into the store this morning to do the report and help out a bit (plus deposit some money in the bank). It was a good thing, too, as I'd asked Drew to open the store this morning, but he didn't show up until well after opening time.
I finally got down to translation after noon, after checking over some my last remaining assignment before settling in for the long haul on El Humungo. Progress continued to be slow, and it was very disheartening. Finally, I put my keyboard aside and picked up a calculator and a pencil and paper.
Assuming I take one day off between now and the 27th, then not counting today, I have 10 days of work left in which to do the job (figure that the half day I had left today gets taken off at the end, when I have to send in the job).
If we divide the pages left (185) by the number of days, we get 18.5 pages per day. Normally, I could probably knock that number of pages out on a daily basis, but this text continues to use a lot of arcane terminology that is not included in my references, so it's probably more reasonable to expect I can do 9-10 pages a day, which translates into 90-100 more pages done by the 27th.
That means I'll have only a little over 80 pages left to do by deadline time.
So, I picked up the phone and called the client to tell them the lay of the land, and suggested they find someone else to pick up those 80 or so pages.
The client has already made it quite clear that the deadline is inflexible, but you never know. Jim W., who is doing the first chunk of the document, wrote me earlier this evening to tell me he only now realizes that he doesn't have three weeks in which to deliver the work, but two. He, too, has apparently told the client to go find someone with whom to share the work.
If I were the client's editor, upon hearing this news, I'd push the project manager really hard to get the client to move the deadline, as the difficulty of doing a good editing job on a document increases exponentially as the number of translators involved goes up. Two translators make the job almost twice as hard; three translators makes it about four times harder, and so on. With four translators on the job, it's going to be pretty much impossible to end up with a high-quality, consistent end product (unless the translation team's been working together for a while).
Multitran.ru has been down for much of the day, making things that much harder. To compensate, I've gone digging in my collection of paper dictionaries, and rediscovered the value of Carpovich's Russian-English Science and Engineering Dictionary. Despite its rather modest title, I recall how it saved my bacon time and time again back before I went to Houston in 1996. And today, it managed to save me a whole lot of time and frustration again. Despite having done a number of translations recently completely without recourse to paper dictionaries, I guess they still have a use, and will continue to have one well into the future.
I just may not need as many of them.
Enough about work.
Cheers...
I finally got down to translation after noon, after checking over some my last remaining assignment before settling in for the long haul on El Humungo. Progress continued to be slow, and it was very disheartening. Finally, I put my keyboard aside and picked up a calculator and a pencil and paper.
Assuming I take one day off between now and the 27th, then not counting today, I have 10 days of work left in which to do the job (figure that the half day I had left today gets taken off at the end, when I have to send in the job).
If we divide the pages left (185) by the number of days, we get 18.5 pages per day. Normally, I could probably knock that number of pages out on a daily basis, but this text continues to use a lot of arcane terminology that is not included in my references, so it's probably more reasonable to expect I can do 9-10 pages a day, which translates into 90-100 more pages done by the 27th.
That means I'll have only a little over 80 pages left to do by deadline time.
So, I picked up the phone and called the client to tell them the lay of the land, and suggested they find someone else to pick up those 80 or so pages.
The client has already made it quite clear that the deadline is inflexible, but you never know. Jim W., who is doing the first chunk of the document, wrote me earlier this evening to tell me he only now realizes that he doesn't have three weeks in which to deliver the work, but two. He, too, has apparently told the client to go find someone with whom to share the work.
If I were the client's editor, upon hearing this news, I'd push the project manager really hard to get the client to move the deadline, as the difficulty of doing a good editing job on a document increases exponentially as the number of translators involved goes up. Two translators make the job almost twice as hard; three translators makes it about four times harder, and so on. With four translators on the job, it's going to be pretty much impossible to end up with a high-quality, consistent end product (unless the translation team's been working together for a while).
Multitran.ru has been down for much of the day, making things that much harder. To compensate, I've gone digging in my collection of paper dictionaries, and rediscovered the value of Carpovich's Russian-English Science and Engineering Dictionary. Despite its rather modest title, I recall how it saved my bacon time and time again back before I went to Houston in 1996. And today, it managed to save me a whole lot of time and frustration again. Despite having done a number of translations recently completely without recourse to paper dictionaries, I guess they still have a use, and will continue to have one well into the future.
I just may not need as many of them.
Enough about work.
Cheers...
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