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Adventures in translation...
Jan. 8th, 2006 04:36 pmGalina went off to do some stuff at the store this morning, and I sat down to translate the assignment due Tuesday morning.
The first two parts served as a kind of warm-up to the "main event," a 3300-source-word document involving light-emitting diodes, railroad equipment, and all sorts of fancy measurements. The first two documents gave up their secrets easily, except for one sentence in the Russian original that was devoid of all punctuation (except for the terminal period), and so had me going around in circles as I tried to nail it down, but I managed to catch hold of Feht for a quick consult, confirming (BTW) that I had, indeed, grokked the words correctly.
The third document started swimmingly but rapidly went downhill as segment after segment notched a 100% score in my Wordfast translation memory. A 100% score means that the exact sentence had been translated previously by me, which normally is good news (do a once-over-lightly, hit Alt-PgDn, and bring up the next sentence), but when all sentences score like that, it generally means you've translated the same document before. I paused in my work to see if I could confirm it was, indeed, an old document, and it was (my first assignment for this client, back in October).
Now, there is a school of thought that says an assignment is an assignment, and it's the client's business to know if they've had you translate the same text before, but it's simply not the way I do business. Tomorrow morning, I shall inform my client of the situation, and then if, after having been so informed, the client instructs me to continue with the assignment (believe it or not, it's happened in a few cases), I can proceed with a clear conscience.
Free time! Wowza!
Cheers...
The first two parts served as a kind of warm-up to the "main event," a 3300-source-word document involving light-emitting diodes, railroad equipment, and all sorts of fancy measurements. The first two documents gave up their secrets easily, except for one sentence in the Russian original that was devoid of all punctuation (except for the terminal period), and so had me going around in circles as I tried to nail it down, but I managed to catch hold of Feht for a quick consult, confirming (BTW) that I had, indeed, grokked the words correctly.
The third document started swimmingly but rapidly went downhill as segment after segment notched a 100% score in my Wordfast translation memory. A 100% score means that the exact sentence had been translated previously by me, which normally is good news (do a once-over-lightly, hit Alt-PgDn, and bring up the next sentence), but when all sentences score like that, it generally means you've translated the same document before. I paused in my work to see if I could confirm it was, indeed, an old document, and it was (my first assignment for this client, back in October).
Now, there is a school of thought that says an assignment is an assignment, and it's the client's business to know if they've had you translate the same text before, but it's simply not the way I do business. Tomorrow morning, I shall inform my client of the situation, and then if, after having been so informed, the client instructs me to continue with the assignment (believe it or not, it's happened in a few cases), I can proceed with a clear conscience.
Free time! Wowza!
Cheers...
