A Twilight-Zone kind of a day...

It seems I've been translating like crazy all day, not really stopping to have to research arcana of any kind, and yet when I take a look at what's left on my plate today, I've still got more than 50% of my self-imposed quota to go.

And just as I was typing "...quota to go" in that last sentence, it occurred to me that I spent most of the morning finishing off the aerospace item that, besides 6 pages of doublespaced text, also had a good half dozen illustrations that had to be cut from the PDF, edited to translate the labels, and then pasted into the translation. So that's where I probably got the momentum to think that I've really been stoking the firebox, so to speak.

In between, I went with Galina to the store for a bit, and also started up a new PBwiki for this humongous job I'm working on with others (a team of translators ought to make good use of the wiki concept, methinks), but that took me exactly a half hour.

I suppose I should count my blessings: at least I'm not having to stop every 11.6 seconds in order to spend a half hour researching some acronym or once-in-a-decade term.

Galina is making something to eat. I can smell it, and my stomach is growling!

Cheers...

Me'n my big mouth!

I had to mention that I was just ripping through today's translation, didn't I?

So, as a reward, the section I was working on came to an end, and I went from 90 to 0 in 3.2 seconds, decelerated by some very unforgiving geological, hydrological, and soil terms. Words so arcane they appear in ones and twos on the Internet at all!

It's hard to select a representative text that humbled me (there's so, so much of it!), but here's a try. Words I didn't know - and which have no easy definition - are shown in boldface:

С учетом условий залегания по рельефу, гранулометрического состава, характера типодиагностических горизонтов выделены почвы: агроземы темные насыщенные среднепахотные глинистые сильносолончаковые в комплексе с агроземами темными насыщенными среднепахотными тяжелосуглинистыми среднесолончаковыми 10-25 %, агроземы темные насыщенные среднепахотные глинистые среднесолончаковые, органолитостраты легкосуглинистые среднесолончаковые.

The following soils can be distinguished, taking account of modes of occurrence with respect to relief, granulometric composition, and nature of typodiagnostic horizons: dark, saturated, moderately arable, clayey, strongly saline agrozem, in a complex with 10–25% dark, saturated, moderately arable, massively argillaceous, moderately saline agrozem, with dark, saturated, moderately arable, clayey, moderately saline, and slightly argillaceous agrozem, and with moderately saline organolithostrata.

I'm sorry: organolithostrata??? Sounds like an updated version of a play by Aristophanes.

And this, a mere 220 words before coming to the end of today's text!

Cheers...