Talking about marionettes...

No sooner do I mention Alfred Hitchcock in a post, than I receive an e-mail headed by the following:

"When an actor comes to me and wants to discuss his character, I say, 'It's in the script.' If he says, 'But what's my motivation?', I say, 'Your salary.'"
      -- Alfred Hitchcock

Hmm. Coincidences on 16-inch centers, I'd say.

* * *I got a call from Vladimir V., who is not really a big fan of e-mail and forums, and we chatted about El Humungo, among other things. It turns out that client M has been asking him to do other projects first, so that in essence, he's only about to start on 150 pages of stuff that Jim W. and I sent him, independently.

He's pretty confident he's not going to make the Friday deadline, and figures the client has to be aware of this, seeing as how the president of the company has been rearranging priorities on assignments, shuffling the priority on this job down to get other stuff done first.

So it turns out that the deadline is going to have to be flexible, which would have been nice to establish earlier on, as it might have made life easier for all of us, but then again, I've had my fill of this project, and there are other, fairly urgent things to be done before I leave on assignment next month.

I did pretty well yesterday, but looking at my "nerd notes" for yesterday's stint, I notice that it took me progressively longer to finish each page as time went on yesterday. This could be attributed either to fatigue or to the fact that later on in the day, I ran across a safety manual on building demolition that's doing a pretty good job of kicking butt. Some of the terms I'm running across... you know the rest. I'm almost reduced to falling back on a tactic that I've never really used: assigning names to things using words like "thingamajig," "whatchamacallit," and "doohickie." Nonetheless, I did 118% of what I wanted to get done yesterday, as far as translation was concerned,

Fortunately, I have less than two pages left on building demolition, after which I have a two-page document on safety related to placing foundations in foundation pits, and a somewhat longer safety manual for lathe operators. That's going to be my quota for the day. If I can do another couple of pages, too, I won't resist the momentum, but I'm not going to hunker down to eek those pages out, either.

Cheers...

Two words: frus trated

Today was one of those inexplicable days where just about everything you do goes directly into a black hole and at the end of the day, as the dust slowly settles into your trachea, you look around and wonder: Where has the day gone?

I tried to repeat yesterday's performance, translation-wise, but it was not to be. I ran into a couple of pages where the terminology was really rough. At 10, I went to the store to make sure Brady was not alone while Drew got the mail, and to do the report. I got out of the store around 12:30.

There were a couple of snail-mail items that needed immediate attention, so that didn't help. I tried to call about whether my visa materials had been received, but spoke to an answering machine. I received a call asking if I could do a short job quickly, and agreed. I got a call from client M asking me to review another bunch of pages and send them to the editor (that killed about 2 hours of what would otherwise have been translation time).

In any event, I got 7 more pages of El Humungo done, and that's all I'm going to do for now. There are 24 pages and three days left (but I also have to review 85 pages of material before I can say I'm really DONE with the job). If I translate 8 pages and review ~30 pages, per day, over the next three days, I'll probably end up in the loony bin, though.

* * *I urgently need to get my hands on an article on page 29 (I think) of this month's "Translatlantic Edition" of a journal titled Internationale Politik. There's an article by one Helga Haftendorn on how NATO is changing that I really need as a research vehicle for something that's coming up. Unfortunately, a call to the journal's El Paso (!) office here in the States revealed that they didn't have any copies of this issue yet, which is the current issue (Vol. 3 of the Transatlantic Edition) that's only been out for 10 days or so, according to the guy in El Paso. I got a number in Germany from the rep in El Paso, and I figure it's worth a try to call and attempt to talk the guy into selling me a copy of the magazine over the phone and then pay him to fax me just that article.

* * *It occurs to me that, despite the fact it pulls in a client or two once in a blue moon, my work-related site is pretty dull and lifeless. It certainly is not "sticky," in the sense that people will want to bookmark it and come back frequently.

I'm kicking around the idea of doing some quid pro quo with some Russian news sites, where I agree to translate some small volume of work for them for, essentially, free, in exchange for which I get to display the original and translation on my site (linking to them, too), and they can use my translation on their site (with a link to mine). The small volume is essential, but how small is small enough? I don't know. Two hundred words per week is not enough; two hundred per day... probably in the ballpark, but I don't know if I'm prepared to make a daily commitment to something like this.

In any event, the key here is that the site has to be popular enough to draw readership (I've actually got a site in mind), but not so popular as to (a) not care for such an arrangement and (b) have way too many things to choose from to translate.

I need to give this more thought, since if I disappear for any period of time (e.g., a trip to, say, Kazakstan), so would my translations and the stickiness of my site.

Cheers...