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I hadn't done that in a long time...
May. 3rd, 2005 08:10 pmNo, I'm not talking about exercise (though they say if the shoe fits...). Then again, I did manage to walk to the corner and back this afternoon after having dressed as well as I could for the cold, drizzly, weather that has kept the sky obscured for the past few days, and which is a shame because the ISS will be making a 10-minute pass that takes it 62° high overhead in about 45 minutes. Anyway...
What the subject line refers to is what might be called focused, goal-oriented editing, of a business letter a client sent me for the purpose of making it sound like colloquial English.
What do I mean by "focused, goal-oriented editing"?
I guess it began with me back in high school, at about the time the seductive lure of the byline hit me (track season, junior year). I somehow became interested in political activism, and a popular myth at the time was the power of writing letters to the editor. It turns out to be not so easy as it looks.
Among the really hard points to master is to keep the text short and direct. This means you don't take your sweet time getting to the point. You don't waste space telling the editor what he already knows. It means you don't write a letter stating your opinion on both abortion and wilderness drilling (unless there is an achingly good reason to do so).
This self-training (there was a pamphlet with tips, but I forget the title or who wrote it) came in handy later when I started working as the staff technical propagandist at Borland, writing about what great things could be accomplished (and they could) using Borland language products.
The problem with the letter wasn't that the English wasn't good; with one or two minor exceptions, it sounded perfectly okay (albeit a bit disorganized). The real problem was that, for a letter asking the recipent to take action, there was remarkably little said about why such action would be of benefit to the recipient.
So, instead of just correcting the few errors and massaging the sentence order a bit to improve the flow, I basically ended up rewriting the thing (looking at the revision mode display in Word, only the first paragraph really retains any original words).
Why didn't I just correct the few minor glitches and send the thing off as-is? Call me a meddlesome busybody, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Anyway, the client appears pleased.
* * * In other news, I translated a 44-slide PowerPoint presentation that had some truly weird stuff in it. A few strings in the document were composed of multiple text boxes containing individual letters, which gave me a turn until I figured out how to deal with them. The client also apparently stripped a bunch of graphics from the file, I suppose to make it more manageable to send via email, but the result also made it harder to translate.
Plate Status: I have another 40-page PowerPoint file to translate tomorrow, and it promises to be a doozy. All about navigation in space. Mah fay-vo-ryt subject!
Cheers...
What the subject line refers to is what might be called focused, goal-oriented editing, of a business letter a client sent me for the purpose of making it sound like colloquial English.
What do I mean by "focused, goal-oriented editing"?
I guess it began with me back in high school, at about the time the seductive lure of the byline hit me (track season, junior year). I somehow became interested in political activism, and a popular myth at the time was the power of writing letters to the editor. It turns out to be not so easy as it looks.
Among the really hard points to master is to keep the text short and direct. This means you don't take your sweet time getting to the point. You don't waste space telling the editor what he already knows. It means you don't write a letter stating your opinion on both abortion and wilderness drilling (unless there is an achingly good reason to do so).
This self-training (there was a pamphlet with tips, but I forget the title or who wrote it) came in handy later when I started working as the staff technical propagandist at Borland, writing about what great things could be accomplished (and they could) using Borland language products.
The problem with the letter wasn't that the English wasn't good; with one or two minor exceptions, it sounded perfectly okay (albeit a bit disorganized). The real problem was that, for a letter asking the recipent to take action, there was remarkably little said about why such action would be of benefit to the recipient.
So, instead of just correcting the few errors and massaging the sentence order a bit to improve the flow, I basically ended up rewriting the thing (looking at the revision mode display in Word, only the first paragraph really retains any original words).
Why didn't I just correct the few minor glitches and send the thing off as-is? Call me a meddlesome busybody, but I couldn't bring myself to do it. Anyway, the client appears pleased.
Plate Status: I have another 40-page PowerPoint file to translate tomorrow, and it promises to be a doozy. All about navigation in space. Mah fay-vo-ryt subject!
Cheers...
