An uneasy night...

I am vaguely aware of dreaming about... tedium. Toward morning, I achieved a state of consciousness that allowed me to recall my dream and it turns out I was actually translating something in my sleep, but I cannot remember what.

Nor can I recall whether the translation was any good. 8^)

The PowerPoint presentation is done and going out the wire as I type this.

Strangely enough, faced with the prospect of completing all outstanding assignments within the next 30 hours or so, I am picking up the slight tingling sensation of - let's give it a tentative name - translator's paranoia (a mental state in which you wonder "Will I ever get another assignment?").

* * *In other news, I'm discouraged at one of CNN's headlines this morning: Gender or race: Black women voters face tough choices in S.C. In my opinion, voting for someone based on their skin color or sex makes voting for someone based on their party affiliation sound positively intellectual. Then again, the headline doubtless reflects the way CNN thinks the world works (or should work).

Headlines like this appear to give some weight to recent wisecracks - stemming from the Nevada primaries, I think - about how, if you vote for Obama, you're a sexist, but if you vote for Hillary, you're a racist.

It must be something in the water.

Cheers...

Making the best...

The nature of the OCR Nightmare - specifically its size - made it necessary to break the text up into smaller files (which also provided an opportunity to remove formatting, which I may come to regret, now that I look at the scope of what needs to be done to make the translation "look like" the original document in terms of logos and other graphics).

To add insult to injury, I've been asked to make incremental deliveries, which is always a pain in the rear, because I often find, as I'm working on the last part of a project, one or more improvements that now cannot be applied to increments previously delivered.

Examples in this assignment of the kind of thing I'm talking about include the following:

• review each use of the word "interim" to see if perhaps "tentative" is a better choice;


• change all occurrences of "well site" to "wellsite"


• change all occurrences of "exhausted" to "worked out"


• about a dozen more "change all x to y" items

The current plan is to continue to work until about 1 pm on the next increment for delivery. Then lunch, another exercise session with Shiloh, and translate the remaining 3700 words of the project. Hopefully, I'll be able to deliver everything by noon tomorrow.

Cheers...

A wanted man...

I just got a call regarding a fairly large interpretation project.

It's nice to be wanted.

It's also nice to run across sentences that are 150+ words long (it makes 3,700 words go by that much faster), but now I'm also finding large chunks of text that slipped past the OCR process for one reason or another. The latest chunk was about 150 words long, and each such chunk effectively increases the number of words that need to be translated.

There are 2400 words left.

Cheers...

UPDATE: It's almost an hour later, and I'm down to 2100 words, not due to any lack of industry, but because of an abundance of extra work. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that the unscanned (and hence, unanticipated) bits will add about 2,000 words to the day's bag, making it a close to 6,000 word day!

Tho' much is taken, much abides...

...so to speak.

Translation of the words in the OCR Nightmare is complete. I suspect formatting and checking will take up the greater part of tomorrow (not to mention I've run across about 6 pages that will have to be done "by hand" completely).

I got somewhat complacent in accepting this job, and in not hitting it hard when I got it, but there'll be time enough for recrimination later.

Much later.

Cheers...