A crummy time to feel "itchy"...

I can't seem to settle down enough to work today, and it's nearly 1:30 pm. I have about 9,000 words left for Friday noon, and I suppose part of my current problem is: the tighter the crunch, the less I want to expose myself to it.

Part of it has to do with the paper chase, where I'm going to increasing lengths to try to recover files from a couple of years ago. I know what I have to do, it just takes a long time to do it (FastMail archives messages as individual .eml files; Thunderbird will import such files... but only one at a time. I've found shareware that purports to do the trick, but it requires .NET, which requires something else, blah, blah, blah...).

In examining the files, it would seem that I ought to be able to concatenate the .eml files, prefacing each one with a blank line and a From_ line, which I recall is the format of the primitive mbox files that used to reside on my various Linux boxen (and which can be imported into T-bird without problem, as I've tested it), but there simply isn't enough time in the day... what I'm saying is that I'm pretty much reconciled to getting down to translation after this post.

* * *But first a word about current events. I am finding Jeffrey Gitomer's observations about television (basically, it's a tremendous waste of time better spent in self-improvement) to be oh, but so true, especially in times of controversy (the Imus affair) and tragedy (the murders at VT), where the best the networks have to offer is to repeat the same "news" and the same "opinions" about said news over, and over, and over again, with the kind of homogeneity one has come to expect in a gallon of whole milk.

You may as well spend the same time watching the clouds roll by; they may all look the same, but at least they don't try to make you feel bad about the world.

Cheers...

The Turk...

The (recently patented) Turk of Amazon's has a great deal of potential - maybe - but if you take a look at the "hits" being offered, more often than not they are exploitative to the n-th degree.

One guy right now is looking for short blog articles, 3-4 paragraphs long, on software and technology, for which he'll pay 50 cents. (And that's pretty good - nay, I'll say exhoribitantly generous - by Turk standards.) Assuming the final product is 100 words long, that's a whole half a cent a word!

Ye gods.

Cheers...

Epiphanies...

The other day, a client sends me a document to translate, with the instruction that I should add the translations beneath the corresponding source text, i.e., turn the document into a bilingual document.

It's a straightforward, if unusual, request, since 90% of the document is in a table, but at first it played merry hell with my typical approach to translation, which involves the use of translation memory, which "devours" the source text piecemeal as you go through the document, reducing it to segments of hidden text embedded within a structure imposed by the translation memory software.

At first, I was stumped as to how I could preserve the source text, with the most likely solution being to translate the text in file A, and then intermingle the source text in the original file with the text in file A to create the deliverable. I dismissed that as too labor-intensive, as I don't know of any clean way of "merging" two tables so that the result is a single table where each cell contains the contents of the original two.

Then, I thought, perhaps I'd just write a macro that duplicated the source text in each cell and marked the "original" text in such a way (double strikethrough) that my translation memory program would ignore it.

Word threw one of its "gee, but Something Bad™ happened and I have to close now, sorry" errors in the middle of that, whereupon a clean and elegant solution struck me squarely between the running lights: translate the original file the way I normally do, except that when the time comes to "clean up" the file, just go in and get rid of the translation memory program's markup (i.e., make hidden text unhidden, and a couple of cosmetic changes).

The result was quite acceptable.

* * *I've been reading a lot of Jeffrey Gitomer's stuff lately. The principal reason is: it makes sense.

No, let me put it another way: Some of the things I've been doing have been a kind of intuitive grasping at the principles that Gitomer lays out in his books. Case in point: my run of presentations at ATA conferences over the past few years.

One of the ideas that piqued my interest was this: when arranging for a referral from a customer, set up a meeting where not only does the customer refers someone to you, but you refer someone to the customer as well.

Now, understand this: Gitomer is writing for an audience of sales people. And although I am not, per se, a salesman, in a very fundamental sense, the fact that I am a freelancer means that I am very much a salesman. (It can probably be argued that hourly workers are sales people, too, but the argument would be more complex, and few people would be swayed.)

The fact that I run a "one-man shop," where I am the CEO and chief bottle-washer is the result of having a pretty good track record with established customers, and being able to satisfy customers who call on me "over the transom," as it were. The fact is, however, that I'd like to leverage my skills and knowledge, and acquire some direct clients (as opposed to acquiring more agency clients who act as intermediaries between me and someone else), not that there's anything wrong with agencies, except for the fact that they are intermediaries.

Anyway, it turns out this idea of Gitomer's is something I've been thinking about for a long time (which only serves to reinforce my... positive attitude towards his stuff), and at first glance (the best) it's pretty exciting. I just hope I can maintain my enthusiasm.

In other news, today was a completely horrid day for translation. I shall have to employ the full spectrum of physically improbable metaphors (shoulder to the wheel, nose to the grindstone, et al.) to get the job moving again, tomorrow.

Cheers...