![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
An active day...
Aug. 16th, 2005 06:27 pmWell, I made it through the day without shooting my mouth off, so unless severely provoked, I ought to be okay (though I wish the meeting secretary would stick to taking minutes instead of adding a lot of... but I digress...).
All parties seem to be successfully fighting the time demon, so as long as no show-stopping problems occur during the myriad of tests that are performed between satellite arrival and launch, we ought to be okay to go on the designated launch date.
During the morning meeting, it was revealed that a trip has been requested to an ancient monastery not far from here during one of the propellant loading days, and while there should be no problem getting a list of participants approved, the jaunt will require whoever is going to get temporary Kazakh visas, because while the monastery is not distant, it is far enough outside the Russian zone to require Kazakh visas. That's the long pole in the tent at this time, and though our Russian hosts hinted that there was some possibility of the visas not being processed in time, they did not sound convincing. I hope I draw light duty that day (i.e., I am not assigned to cover the prop loading) because the trip sounds interesting, but - as the song goes - que sera, sera.
There was a second meeting immediately after the first this morning, and as nobody showed up to support it, I stayed for the duration. This was primarily a meeting where the Russian side wanted to nail down exactly what all has been requested for this campaign in terms of various technical issues, so as to avoid unexpected - and unfulfillable - requests later down the line. The meeting went very well, and I'm glad to have been instrumental in helping the sides achieve a mutual understanding.
Upon returning to the interpreter office, there were four documents in need of Russian-English translation, which I dispatched with relative ease. Nobody said anything about today's minutes, and I elected not to ask.
Last night, one of the ILS folks came back to the hotel - where I was "on call" - and asked me to translate an urgent fax into Russian. After flailing around for a while, I fired up Skype and called Feht in Pagosa for a few pointers, which were quite useful in generating a final product, which I, in turn, ran by one of the staff members in the hotel to reveal any obvious errors.
My somewhat nonobvious reaction to all the into-Russian work is to strive to somehow improve my abilities in the into-Russian direction. Two immediate actions I have taken: I've downloaded a program that claims to help one better understand Russian case endings (my big problem), and I have commenced exploring the possibilities of adding machine-aided translation from English to Russian to my bag of tricks. This will either take the form of aligning existing translations for work with a TM product, or learning to use a more traditional MT product, such as PROMT.
Most folks have returned from work; time to go eat dinner.
Cheers...
All parties seem to be successfully fighting the time demon, so as long as no show-stopping problems occur during the myriad of tests that are performed between satellite arrival and launch, we ought to be okay to go on the designated launch date.
During the morning meeting, it was revealed that a trip has been requested to an ancient monastery not far from here during one of the propellant loading days, and while there should be no problem getting a list of participants approved, the jaunt will require whoever is going to get temporary Kazakh visas, because while the monastery is not distant, it is far enough outside the Russian zone to require Kazakh visas. That's the long pole in the tent at this time, and though our Russian hosts hinted that there was some possibility of the visas not being processed in time, they did not sound convincing. I hope I draw light duty that day (i.e., I am not assigned to cover the prop loading) because the trip sounds interesting, but - as the song goes - que sera, sera.
There was a second meeting immediately after the first this morning, and as nobody showed up to support it, I stayed for the duration. This was primarily a meeting where the Russian side wanted to nail down exactly what all has been requested for this campaign in terms of various technical issues, so as to avoid unexpected - and unfulfillable - requests later down the line. The meeting went very well, and I'm glad to have been instrumental in helping the sides achieve a mutual understanding.
Upon returning to the interpreter office, there were four documents in need of Russian-English translation, which I dispatched with relative ease. Nobody said anything about today's minutes, and I elected not to ask.
Last night, one of the ILS folks came back to the hotel - where I was "on call" - and asked me to translate an urgent fax into Russian. After flailing around for a while, I fired up Skype and called Feht in Pagosa for a few pointers, which were quite useful in generating a final product, which I, in turn, ran by one of the staff members in the hotel to reveal any obvious errors.
My somewhat nonobvious reaction to all the into-Russian work is to strive to somehow improve my abilities in the into-Russian direction. Two immediate actions I have taken: I've downloaded a program that claims to help one better understand Russian case endings (my big problem), and I have commenced exploring the possibilities of adding machine-aided translation from English to Russian to my bag of tricks. This will either take the form of aligning existing translations for work with a TM product, or learning to use a more traditional MT product, such as PROMT.
Most folks have returned from work; time to go eat dinner.
Cheers...
