Recalibration...

It really is annoying to have an agency give you a source word count down to the units column yet have the file for translation be delivered in a format that intrinsically doesn't allow word counts. Thank goodness for OCR programs!

For OCR, I use FineReader 6.0, a program that I struggled to find a legal copy of in Russia a few years ago (finally buying one at the ABBYY company offices in Moscow!).

I really like the job FineReader does, although as I've mentioned in previous posts, I find the result of its attempts to deliver formatted output in Word to be hilarious. I'm simply better off asking for unformatted output, and then formatting the text myself. Typically, for large jobs, I'll just format far enough into the murk to be able to do that day's work, especially if the formatting is complex.

As I'm getting to a critical stage in the job due Friday morning, I decided to format the text through to the end of the section I'm translating before we depart for Farmington (no way to put the trip off, really, and the break will likely be beneficial). Doing so would give me a much more accurate count of work left to be done, which turns out to have been a good idea, because yesterday, when I quit, I was under the impression that I had about 5,100 words left to translate in the project. The actual scope of work left to do is about 4,600 words, at least 300 of which are numbers.

The difference isn't much - about an hour of work for me - but an hour is an hour, and at the end of a long day, an hour is a lot. If nothing else, the clarification of uncertainty has lifted my spirits.

I ought to be able to find the time to do a couple of hours of work before I hit the sack tonight, which ought to make Thursday go that much more smoothly.

Cheers...

Weird day...

While I was working in Texas, Galina was up here in Pagosa Springs arranging to renovate the house we have up here. The house required a massive amount of work (less now, but still quite a bit), and it seemed that a good start might be to get our personal stuff out of it before starting to tear out walls, carpets, etc.

Quite a bit of stuff went into a rented container that's sitting out in front of the house. Unfortunately, putting labels on boxes isn't Galina's strong suit, so it's going to be a job to figure out what's in what box. The rest - and the astute reader will by now understand that there's no way of telling what "the rest" means - was conveyed to an auction house in Bloomfield, New Mexico, an outfit Galina did business with years ago when we moved from California to Colorado and had to liquidate an antique business.

Galina basically emptied the house into the auctioneer's truck, and today, I had two goals in going to New Mexico along with Galina: to get a key out of the safe that was removed, and to retrieve a Tiffany crystal vase (with sterling silver trim) that had been given to us as a belated wedding present by an old friend of my parents.

When I walked into the storage area at the auction house, though, my eyes kept encountering items that... well... I'm not at all sure I would have gotten rid of them just like that, and to be frank, there were some items that I was tempted to "rescue." But then, as I stood there, looking around at all this stuff, a nearly overwhelming feeling of creepiness came over me (as is probably right and proper on Halloween, but I digress...).

Seriously, though, I realized I felt that way because it was as if I was looking at what was left of... my... what? life? after I had died.

Think of it as a sort of Ghost-of-Christmas-Yet-To-Come kind of moment, but without the schmaltz. As I looked around, I wondered, is something like this, a pile of stuff in a warehouse somewhere, waiting for the auctioneer's gavel, is that all there is?

Paraphrashing the same line from Samuel Johnson for the second time in six weeks, it seems that having lost both parents within the past year or so has concentrated my thoughts quite effectively on death and dying. (After all, there were those two trips to the emergency room, nie?)

I really need to snap out of that line of thought, as it cannot possibly be overly helpful.

* * *The client who sent me a one-page patent item Monday sent me a zip file today with the rest of the patent, which I found out about only after Galina and I left for New Mexico. I texted an email back from by BB, saying that I might be able to do 1000 words for tomorrow, but wouldn't be back until the end of the day. I never heard anything back.

When we finally returned home, it turned out the text was nearly 1800 source words long and turgid in only the way that patent language can be. I hate to disappoint a client, but I wrote a second email saying I couldn't do the job. Instead, I stuck to the plan and put a dent in the job due Friday morning (3300 words left as of a few minutes ago).

I don't know why I am tired, since I did little mental or physical work, but I am. Time to go to sleep.

Cheers...