Swabbing the decks...

After reviewing and sending off my last remaining item before starting on the 60K job, I decided to catch up on some recordkeeping. My TWiki system for doing so resides behind a firewall, and is thus not available when I'm away from the office, which was the case for much of the past month.

It turns out this was not a futile exercise, as it uncovered a failure on my part to invoice a fairly hefty job (more than 15,000 words), which is a nice piece of change to have suddenly "found." I also have to send invoices for the three jobs done recently for client "A" and the one job done for client "B" over the weekend.

Got to go spell Drew at the store. Be back soon.

Cheers...

Birthday closing in...

Huntur's second birthday is rapidly approaching, and her other grandma (Ellen, Shannon's mom) is probably already in Pagosa by now (along with some other offspring and grandoffspring) to help celebrate the day. I went to the store to work while Drew took Huntur back home, once Shannon's marathon cleaning session came to an end. By the time I left, Ellen had called from Durango, which is a mere hour away (and that was about an hour ago).

I should have picked up the FineReader 6.0 upgrade while I was in Moscow. It cost $89 there, but $149 if you buy it through their U.S. distributor. Feh. What's worse is that the default installation assumes that the user could not possibly want to recognize text in any language other than English, or at least that's my working theory. (If I got sold a version that recognized only English, I am going to be one upset customer.) Just now I ran across a Service Pack for the 6.0 product, and the size of the file is actually greater than the size of the file I downloaded for the upgrade. Feh, again.

While I'm on the subject, I upgraded my TRADOS license yesterday at the special introductory upgrade rate, which is fairly cheap ($40). Now the only thing I have left to upgrade is my Déjà Vu license, which is supposed to be free, but the procedure is not obvious.

For some reason, the DSL connection is taking its own sweet time, and I'm only getting about 24 KB/sec through the pipe to download the 39 MB service pack. Tap... tap... tap...

I really need my upgraded FR to be able to recognize Russian.

Cheers...

UPDATE: After attempting to install Russian language recognition via a re-install, it turns out the version I bought doesn't "do" Russian. (It's supposed to do 122 languages, but the only one that's shown or available for recognition is English... heck, I see no trace of any of the other 121 languages FR is supposed to recognize.)

Here's the text on the ABBYY web page that caught me:

Digital delivery supports 122 recognition languages. All Cyrillic based languages are not included in this version. To obtain a Cyrillic-Plus version, please click "back" on the browser and return to the product listing page and select physical delivery..." (emphasis mine)

I interpreted the bolded sentence to mean that the product did not include all Cyrillic-based languages (e.g., Ukrainian), not that the product included no Cyrillic languages. (How can you provide recognition for 122 languages and not include Russian?)

Anyway, I've called the U.S. distributor (Digital River) and they're sending me a physical box.

Lotsa math...

60K - which is what I'm calling the current job - is taking me back to the start of my translation career.

It's the late 70s. I'm working at Plenum Publishing Corporation, as a "production editor." That basically meant that once all of the translations for a journal were received, it was my job to mark them up for style, grammar, and spelling before they were sent out for technical editing. Once they were back from the editor, it was my job to send the translations to typing, to proofreading, to the mechanical art department, and then finally, to supervise "press checking" of the finished product.

In those days, good references were hard to find. I remember some of the dictionaries on my shelf were dated from the 1950s (and were well and truly useless... I don't think I cracked open any of them a second time while I worked there). We did all of our "research" using a first edition copy of Callaham's excellent Russian-English Chemical and Polytechnical Dictionary.

So it should come as no surprise that I began to compile a file of terms and style/usage hints. I kept them on the backs of business cards from a defunct enterprise of mine, inside of a metal business-card file.

Believe it or not, that file box surfaced a few months ago. I gave it a light once-over at the time, but as 60K is making me recall the millions of translation words I edited annually while at Plenum, I find myself tempted now, at the end of the work day, to browse those cards, especially as I've run across a couple of the terms that caused us all so much grief way back when.

The one that comes immediately to mind is рекурретное соотношение. I remember how the technical editor (I forget the name of the journal) insisted it always be rendered as "recurrence relation" (instead of "recursion relation"). Multitran gives both, BTW, and I happen to prefer the latter to the former.

* * *There is a certain music to the language of computational mathematics and mathematical physics. Listen...

Примем шаг h = 0.01, ожидая при этом, что значения, полученные по методу (10), окажутся приблизительно на порядок более точным, чем значения метода трапеции.

We adopt an interval h = 0.01, thus expecting the values obtained using method (10) to be approximately an order of magnitude more exact than the values obtained using the method of trapezoids.

Yeah, I'm probably crazy and it sounds like mush to normal ears. So shoot me.

Today was not the most productive of days (2300 words), but that's okay. Tomorrow, as has been said, is another day.

Cheers...