About to pause...

I should have taken a closer look yesterday at the French document that arrived for translation. It cannot exactly be described as a cakewalk, and had I known this, I would not have wasted a couple of hours during the morning trying to make head or tail of the invoicing feature of an accounting package I recently installed on my machine.

The good news is that I'm just over 20% of the way through the document. The bad news is that at this rate, I have another 8 hours of work in front of me.

I've been slacking off on my exercise, and am feeling a bit butt-heavy after sitting in my office chair all day, so I'm going to risk getting thoroughly wet and go for a bike ride around the neighborhood (I'm pretty sure it's stopped raining, but there are always the puddles to contend with!).

With any luck, I ought to be able to put in another 5-6 hours once I get back.

Cheers...

One strange day...

One of the things I'd like to get done is to automate the process of issuing invoices.

One criterion I've established is that the tool must be open source. While I realize that software publishers need income to survive, I'm not terribly keen on being a source of that income and having to not only continually upgrade the executables, but also cede more and more control over what outsiders see of my business.

I've made my peace with the idea of issuing one invoice per document (most of the systems I've looked at only allow one client reference number on the invoice), but I can see where something like that could be a problem, say, when dealing with a job comprising a dozen short documents, each of which has its own client reference number. Issuing a dozen invoices just doesn't seem right.

Anyway, that's something to think about for later.

I should not have wasted time with TurboCASH this morning, because after OCRing the PDF with the pages I needed to translate for tomorrow and then doing a spell-check, it turned out there were about 3700 words in the document, and it was very nearly noon.

I finished about 800 of them by 2:30 pm, which isn't very productive, but then again, I was doing a lot of research on the Internet and honing a technique that allows me to find meanings for terms without necessarily using dictionaries. (I'm sure if I explained it in detail, I'd be stoned at the next annual conference of the ATA. Then again... the translation editor has yet to complain.)

Anyway, at 2:30 pm, I took a break and went cycling for about 30 minutes, which I did despite the fact that it had rained cats and dogs (and various assorted other house pets) in the morning. Upon returning home, slightly the wetter for wear, I found checks in the mail, so I jumped in the car to go to the bank and deposit them and to make sure that last week's wire went out in euros and not dollars (it did). Between this and that, I finally got back to work at a quarter to six, whereupon I had a very productive hour, followed by a glacially unproductive hour.

How I hate it when that happens! (Though the optimist in me says it could be worse: I could be unproductive all the time. Heh.)

In any event, as of a few minutes ago I've got just under 900 words left in the job, which is going to have to do for tonight, especially in light of an unusual response I got from my client regarding busting one's butt on jobs like this. In fact, given that response, having a mere 900 words left is ginormously groovy, but I begin to split hairs...

I'm going to go listen to a couple of podcasts, maybe, and then go to sleep.

Cheers...