Coming up for air...

Shiloh got me up somewhere short of 5 am by going to the window and growling at something outside, after which I tossed and turned for a few minutes, looked at the time, and decided to start the review.

With the kind of deadlines clients typically impose, it's becoming increasingly difficult to find the time to do a proper edit of one's own translation.

For example, reviewing one's own work at 2,000 words per hour would require reading and comparing two sentences (source and target) that are each about as long as this one every minute for an entire hour.

The job that's about to go out the door is 25,000 words long, so... do the math. And frankly, at 2,000 words per hour, you soon find your eyeballs fuzzing over.

Generally speaking, when there simply isn't time to do a 100% review, my technique consists of checking four sentences per page, selected randomly (although for all I know, there is some kind of systematic error in my randomness, something that would, say, horrify a crypographer). Any sentence that I find to contain an error adds a score of 5 to the number of sentences to be reviewed - again at random - during a second pass. Any major error, such as an omission, adds 10.

The result is used to figure out how many sentences to check per page during the second pass, which is similarly scored in case a third pass is required.

I can get away with this approach for only one reason: it works. In any event, it works for me, as my base "style" tends to not contain a lot of errors in my original translation, which is something that has been verified by having had a lot of my stuff edited over the years. (Editors seem to like me. In fact, during one visit to a client's office, the entire editing department actually hunted me down to shake my hand).

Things that get checked 100% before jobs go out the door are the flashy bits, such as cover letters, title pages, tables of contents, figure and table captions, and introductory materials. After all, if the only error you make in a book-length translation is in the title on the cover, well... in the words of a very old commercial for Cinzano wine: "that is not nice."

It's also important to take breaks during the checking process, as I have done to write this post. Now, back for my second pass.

Cheers...

Aack!

Between losing the Kazakhstan assignment and finding out, a little while ago, that the woman who lives next door has died, I feel as if someone oughta be yelling, "INCOMING!"

For crying out loud.

Cheers...

UPDATE: (7:15 pm): It occurs to me, as I digest dinner and sip some excellent Bushmills single malt Irish, that perhaps the demise of our neighbor, who had been ill for some time, was Providence's own way of pointing out to me that there are worse things in life than losing work.