In intimidating wind...

One thing about having a basement office on the leeward side of the house, the sound of wind is hardly ever heard. Here on the windward side of the house (the prevailing wind blows from the southwest, it seems), it is disconcerting to have a loud, whooshing accompaniment to the tapping of fingers on my keyboard.

Galina arrived home last night, tired and apparently in a foul mood. Among other issues, it seems her planner has gone missing. I last saw it in the hotel room just before taking her to the airport, and I'm pretty sure I put it into her carry-on bag. If so, that's bad news, for as is often the case with paper-based planners, losing it means losing everything you've written down in it since you started using it. I hope I'm wrong and that it turns up somewhere.

Work continues apace and I am thankful for the extension on the big job. I received a rush job due about 40 minutes ago (delivered about 50 minutes ago) that weighed in at just over 1400 target words, and after that I put the final touches on the edit accepted yesterday and put it in the email a few minutes ago (~7500 words). In the meantime, the first client has sent another 1000 source words, due in, um, an hour and 20 minutes.

I better get cracking.

Cheers...

Apropos of editing...

I have been peddling words in one form or another for most of my working life. In those arenas where there were people around to edit my work and slap it into shape, I've pretty much always been of the opinion that the really important part of the whole process comes when the check clears.

Perhaps I've been more fortunate than most. Back when I wrote articles and reviews for the computer press, I never had my opinion changed for me by an editor (though I do remember one Wayne Green publication whose editor rewrote virtually every sentence they bought from me), and I really only had one run-in with an editor (at Byte, with a new hire who insisted on eliminating every instance of the passive voice in an article that described the operation of some code).

Generally speaking, however, the things I've written haven't really needed a lot of editing, which perhaps helps explain why I don't become hysterical or throw tantrums if someone decides to blueline my immortal prose.

Interestingly, I've only seen strong emotions on the subject of editing among translators. And almost uniformly, the emotion is wasted.

As in the time a translator insisted on having her name removed from a translation because an editor changed her "titan" (a transliteration from Russian) to the correct word: "titanium."

As in the time a translator insisted that when speaking of a birthplace, it was proper American English to say, "Mr. X was born at New York."

As in the time a translator insisted that cosmonauts flew "toward" the Mir space station, and not "to" it aboard the Shuttle.

I could go on, but I'm sure this song has been played before. I have finished the first half of the editing job, from Mr. In-Your-Face, which puts that ordeal mostly behind me (the second half of the translation, done by another translator, may require me to make some additional changes in the first part of the document).

It's been a long day: almost 2700 target words laid down on phosphor and nearly 5,000 words edited.

Cheers...