Maintaining an even strain...

Well, I hit the sack pretty early yesterday, but then again, I was tired and had the prospect of a fairly busy day ahead of me today (not involving going to the mall to shop, but I digress...). Natalie retired to the spare bedroom, together with Lily, her cat, and Galina was doing the after-Thanksgiving dinner cleanup, so after eyeballing the text to get an idea of what would be required of me on the morrow, I went to bed.

I woke at a little after midnight and, as it turned out, couldn't fall back asleep. I finally decided to get out of bed around 1 am. A few minutes later, I was at my computer and working on the job.

Eight thousand source words is a pretty hefty day's work, all other things being equal, and as I mentioned in my previous post, the job is a high-visibility document for a new client, so there's some additional pressure involved. However, despite there not being much repetition within the text, it turned out to be not a difficult text to deal with, so by the time I finally stopped for the... night? day?... I had just 3,000 source words left to translate.

I had a little bit of trouble turning myself "off" at the end of the session. I had wanted to go to sleep at 5:30 am, after having gotten a few hundred words into a fairly long and complex 3,500-word section of solid text (comprised of quotes from the Russian press). I found this section to be tougher going than what had come previously, mostly because of the occasional colloquialism or simply poor writing. (I base the latter evaluation on significant experience derived from calling Feht with a question about some passage or other that I've encountered in a translation, to which he has almost always replied "Well, that's illiterate...," followed by a rant on the current lack of skill among writers of Russian.)

In any event, I guess I just didn't want to stop on a less-than-positive note, because I skipped past that section and went for another hour at my previous pace, to 6:30 am, whereupon I well and truly shut down my machine.

I've been up since about 11:15 am, and working since lunch. I have about 1400 source words left in the job overall, after which I shall have to take a break of a few hours in preparation for a very careful review. I think I'll go stretch for a bit.

Cheers...

A 10K day...

It's not often I get to lay 10,000 words down on phosphor in one day. Then again, today has not been any kind of normal day.

I'm sending off the translated document in the background while composing this post. I feel pretty good about the work, as I was able to apply a pretty good spit shine to the final product before it went out the door.

In other news, I would really like to be able to play DVDs from other regions on something other than my computer, and of course, this being the season for commercial overkill (in most jurisdictions), some of my thoughts have strayed in the direction of buying a new DVD player.

So far, I've determined that just because a player can deal with NTSC and PAL-formatted disks doesn't mean it can deal with disks from different regions. Apparently, though, there are a load of players out there that, given the right set of pressed buttons on the remote, will allow the user to play DVDs from various regions. I had hoped that the super-cheap player featured at the local Kroger's, manufactured by a certain Coby, would fit the bill, but instead was warned away from buying the unit via a series of not-very-encouraging online reviews.

I need to go to sleep, even though I don't really feel tired. I've not had very much sleep today at all.

Cheers...