Step right up, ladles and jellyspoons...

Oh, but it's turning out to be one of those Fridays where I spend most of my time reviewing incoming assignments.

So far, I've booked about 3,000 words for Monday and 8,000 words for Tuesday, most of which I plan to nail this weekend. Next week, while Drew, Shannon and Huntur are at the AMPC trade show in California, I'll be in the store during the day, so my availability will be limited to a couple-three hours in the evenings (although I don't plan on working every night).

Then I've just agreed to do about 9,000 words for April 2 and another 14,000 words for April 12 (although the latter is still in the "offer" stage to the client, but I'm fairly confident the work will come through). These last two jobs will give me an opportunity to see how well the Wordfast "alignment" feature works (you take a source document and its translation and create a translation memory database from the two).

* * *The snow is melting and the runoff is high in the roadside ditches. It reminds me of the same time of year a couple of dozen moons ago, when Sasha, the Dog Who Would Chew Anything, ran back and forth in those ditches with wild abandon, splashing ice-cold water with gusto.

I still miss that dog.

Cheers...

Mundanity...

I don't think it's a word, and if it isn't, certainly won't lay claim to a neologism. "Mundanity" is such an ugly word.

But it describes the day, down to a tee.

I finished the suite of documents for my main Houston client, and then had a very strange conversation with one of my contacts down there. Indeed, the conversation was so strange, I'm not sure I understood the import of it at all.

On the other hand, both that client and one other had a need to shoot large amounts of data in my direction, and my "work" wiki apparently was not able to pick up the load. I ended up creating accounts for both clients on onegin, opening an ftp "door" for them through my router, and then slamming that door with a resounding cybernetic crash after they'd finished sending me files to review.

I dropped by the store around 4 pm and held the fort until closing time, then went to the market to pick up some victuals for the evening meal.

All very boring.

OTOH, I am up to my virtual eyeballs in work. Among other tasks, I am currently about 12% of the way through aligning a huge document that was sent to me for reference. The process is semi-automated, getting me to a point where two files are open inside of Word: the source file and the translation, arranged "segment" by "segment." The trick is to make sure the segments match (or "align") from start to finish, at which point I can sic the text extraction engine on the pair and create a translation memory.

BTW, this marks, I believe, the first time that a client has provided Russian and English versions of the same document for my guidance (massing in at just under 30,000 words, I might add). Usually, the reference provided is the English translation, where one is left to one's own devices to figure out what's what.

Once I am finished, I hope to have a fairly sizeable translation memory that'll help me take on the nearly 20,000 source words I accepted today. We'll see.

Cheers...