Look to your fonts!

One of the comments received from our nit-picky client concerning Feht's and my translation was that a particular table's title and column headings "hadn't been translated." On our copy, however, everything was just fine.

Given there were some other comments that either made no sense or were thrown in "for good measure" (i.e., to get us to look at the whole corpus again just for kicks), my response was basically: please clarify.

Well, the clarification came back this morning: it wasn't that the title and headings hadn't been translated, it was that they were showing up as strange characters (bullet points, etc.).

Now, that's a whole different pancake!

"Untranslated" implies the presence of original words. "Looks funny" has a very simple, direct cause: look to your fonts!

For the longest time, fonts were the bane of translators working in Russian and English. A few years ago, I gave a presentation at the ATA Conference - I think it was in Los Angeles - on "Navigating the Cyrillic 'Swamp'," and it was very well attended. The associated PowerPoint presentation is one of the most sought-after URLs on my work web site.

It's been a long time since these kinds of problems have turned up to plague me, but I nevertheless has the presence of mind to open the offending file (to tell the truth, more to confirm I wasn't crazy, and that the table in question really had been translated), but then an old habit kicked in and I glanced at the font box in the toolbar.

It said "Helvetica."

Fact: In the course of my work, I've accumulated quite a number of fonts that will properly display Latin and Cyrillic characters, so it's a rare file indeed that won't display on my system.

Fact: Helvetica is a common enough font, but not common in Windows, where the MS house version of Helvetica exists under the name "Arial."

I got on the horn to my client and suggested she might highlight the table and its title, and change the font from Helvetica to Arial.

Bingo! Tout va!

Cheers...

Before you know it...

So I took a little time off to rub Galina's feet and watch the last 20 minutes of Scent of a Woman. Then I came back to my computer, where I had already plowed through about 50% of a procedure due tomorrow at 8 am. I started slowly on a long series of tables and - before I knew it - had very nearly reached the end.

I tried to stop a couple of times, but the notion of getting up early tomorrow to pick up where I had left off kept me at it. So now, I need only get up early enough to check my work and then finish the other item I was working on when the procedure dropped into my inbox.

For the first time since pretty much moving from the basement into my upstairs digs, the floor has been cleared of extraneous boxes and miscellaneous crap, with remarkably little of it having been redirected anywhere else. This is a promising sign.

Time to go to bed.

Cheers...