Breather...

I've written 3300 target words of the translation (8 source pages), averaging about two pages of source material per hour. There are 13 pages of untranslated text left.

In between my adopted style of attacking the assignment in two-page "bursts," I've managed to eat lunch, rest for an hour, and build a spreadsheet in OpenOffice that tells me my final word count (not counting the bibliography, which I've already done) is going to be closer to 11,000 words

The text reminds me a lot of the material I used to churn out for Plenum back in the day, both as an editor and as a translator. I still have a good feel for the "flow" of the language of plasma physics, so there is a certain fluency in grokking the source text. Then again, there have been a couple of instances where sentences in the current job have stopped me in my tracks, though not for any great length of time.

One example of such strangeness is illustrated by the fragment

...их концентрация в зоне образования вторичной плазмы оказывается больше или одного порядка с концентрацией первичной плазменной струи. (Emphasis mine)

The only thing I could come up with was

...their concentration in the zone of secondary plasma generation turns out to be greater than or of the same order as the primary plasma plume concentration.

As a sanity check, I sent the source and my try to Feht, who replied that the source text is illiterate and might correctly be written thus

...их концентрация в зоне образования вторичной плазмы оказывается больше концентрации первичной плазменной струи или того же порядка.

It turns out that the formulation in my source document (...больше или одного порядка с...) can be found on the Internet, which gets into a discussion I had recently on how errors may or may not be indicative of language evolution. But rehashing/continuing that discussion is something for another day.

I'm going to go stretch my legs and then get back to work... hey! it's not even 2 pm yet!

Cheers...

Done for the day...

Well, 5,000 words ought to about do it for the day, leaving me with something like 4,000 words to write tomorrow (though if my spreadsheet is to be believed, it should be a skosh less). It is time to put plasma physics out of my mind for the rest of the day.

Despite my interest in memory and memorization, I am terrible with names. The other day, I was trying to recall the last name of someone I worked with at JSC, whose husband also worked at JSC (and at a fairly high level, too) and though I could remember their first names... their family name eluded me. Even my old, tried-and-true tactic of mentally "relaxing" and letting my subconscious work on the problem for a few minutes or hours didn't work.

Today, in going through a box of photos, I ran across a shot taken of me and my colleague, taken at the Cosmonaut Training Center at Korolev, north of Moscow, and I guess the clear visual must've swept away the cobwebs, because I looked at the photo and - still not remembering the last name of the person in the photo with me - I said her first name with a rising inflection, paused for a beat, whereupon her last name popped out of my mouth like an exploding New Year's noisemaker.

In other news, the snow outside got wet enough yesterday and it got cold enough last night (and stayed that way) to freeze the top surface - or maybe the entire thickness - into a layer of ice that will support my weight in most places. Neither I nor (thank goodness) Shiloh can get much purchase on the stuff.

It's dinner time (at least for Shiloh).

Cheers...