Keyboard fun... (not!)

Sometimes, it will turn out that as I am quietly typing away furiously, with my eyes focusted on something other than my screen, some application will pop up unbidden to announce something important and wait for me to hit the Enter key, at which point I am generally shifting my gaze to the screen, just in time to see what's happening, but not in time to understand it.

Worse, the application will decide it wants to do something important, so it pops up over whatever I am doing to ask, grabs input focus, and asks if it's okay to proceed. A classic burning-fuse moment, wouldn't you say? (Especially as the camera zooms in on a tight shot of my pinky depressing the Enter key...)

At other times, as I am using Word or another component of the Office suite of applications, my fingers will become uncoordinated, either by their own movement or position on the keyboard, and I'll end up grazing some unknown (and unreproducible) combination of keystrokes that causes an irreversible alteration of my work environment. (Normally, the result of such fingerfehler is for some menu selection to go to the Great Bit-Bucket In The Sky™).

Something like this must've happened a little while back while using Word, because now, at the drop of a hat, Word will pop up what is for me a completely useless Thumbnail pane along the left side of my work area. I can't see where to get rid of it among the options, and so far, Web searches reveal that while there are many pages with information about thumbnails, few specifically refers to Word, and none of the ones I've looked at address my problem. Le sigh.

I'm sure there's a fix for this, I just need to find the time to find it. In the meantime, I've created a keyboard macro to toggle the Thumbnail view, which is a darn sight faster than clicking the appropriate menu item to get rid of it.

Cheers...

Foul mood...

Probably because I have a 6,000-word document, of which two-thirds has been "pre-translated" by TRADOS. My job, in addition to translating the new bits, is to make sure the pretranslated ordure segments that TRADOS inserted are correct.

Not surprisingly, most of them need editing. And even when they are correct, they still exhibit problems (an easy example of is the mixing of "m/s" and "m/sec" throughout the pretranslated text).

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Editing translations is generally harder than writing the original translation.

Simplifying tremendously, all the translator has to do is read, grok, and write.

The editor, on the other hand, must read, grok, compare the grok to what has been written, decide what (if anything) needs changing, and then change it.

If a translation is well-written, the editor can work faster than the translator (though in my experience never so fast as to attain parity of remuneration).

If a document contains "pretranslated" text, the editor's work is hindered by literally an order of magnitude (in the mathematical sense of the term), though his or her rate of pay remains unchanged.

And what really hurts is the fact that most agencies don't understand this. They don't differentiate "editing a translation" and "editing pretranslated text."

Right now, though, I am less stressed by the rotten pay than by the sheer volume of work. So I better get to it.

Cheers...

UPDATE: One small advantage of seeing pretranslated bits is seeing how one's declared competitors handle various situations. The associated disadvantage is seeing just how bad a translation can be and still be considered usable by your client.

Winding down...

Fortunately, the job for tomorrow looks like a no-brainer. Although I still have about 3000 words left to go, they shouldn't take me more than about another hour tops, since there's so much repetition in the text.

I went upstairs to rub Galina's feet and caught the last 10 minutes or so of xXx, which gave way to the sequel, which I decided to watch.

What an utter waste of... very nearly everything. Time in particular.

* * *Today was Shiloh's first experience with snow, as there was a fine coating on the ground when we got up. Snow continued to fall, though with an utter lack of dedication to the job, so that by the end of the day, the landscape looked pretty much the same.

Shiloh was fascinated. She tried to eat the snow. All of it. Plus, all of any discipline she had acquired over the past few days went the way of yesteryear's snowfall. I really need to devote some serious attention to her obedience, or lack of it.

Cheers...

Milestones...

Hmmm, 6A sells LJ to SUP and Putin's United Russia party manages a victorious election, all in one day.

The mind boggles.

Cheers...