One down...

...and I think I'm going to call it a day (more or less).

Probably the nastiest documents you ever want to come across as a translator are engineering drawings, or at least that's been my experience working from Russian into English.

Aside from having their own language (which in the end is a tractable problem, if you pay attention to what you're doing, and do so over a long enough period of time), they generally are not amenable to electronic editing, as CAD has yet to make a dent into a backlog of the kind of engineering drawings I typically deal with going back for at least a generation. Nor are they convenient to use (about the only way to rationally handle them is in their full size, which nearly always means much bigger than your monitor).

I was approached last week by a new client who had this drawing that had been photocopied, piece by piece, and the copies then collated into a PDF. I quoted a price and deadline that I felt pretty sure they'd decline, but they agreed, and since they score a 5 out of 5 on the Proz.com "Blue Board" (where translators can post feedback about clients, as an expression of "Likely to Work With Again"), I took the job.

Wow.

I keep forgetting that part about "having their own language."

I spent an inordinate amount of time looking stuff up, but then again, Galina was out hunting for kitchen appliances, so it wasn't as if I had to be anywhere (not to mention I did quote a pretty exhorbitant rate).

Apropos of which, I am apparently the "cleanup" translator, because apparently, someone roped a bilingual non-translator into a first pass at the drawing, and the result was about what you can expect with that approach. Still, it calls for extra elbow grease on my part to make sure nobody gets "buyer's remorse" because they figure the translation they paid for is only moderately better.

Hey! It's not even 5 pm. I should get out of the house and walk around!

Cheers...

En passant...

Yesterday, I experienced something I hadn't felt for quite some time, literally: When I passed from the dining room through the door onto the patio, I felt absolutely no change in ambient environment; it was as if I had walked from the dining room the other way, into the kitchen.

That's unusual, because upon leaving the house, there will almost always be a perception of a change of environment, i.e., that it's warmer or cooler.

It was a nice feeling!

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I downloaded the latest version of Google Maps onto my Blackberry. This is the version that - if I intuit this correctly - figures out where you are, approximately, by pinpointing the cell tower your phone is linking to.

Well, the other day, immediately after firing up the new software, it told me I was located near the old NY-15L Nike site around City Island (with Google estimating an error of 5 km). Just now, it places me on highway 137, not too far from Stamford, Connecticut, about 2 km south of Merritt Parkway (with a stated error of 1.7 km).

Not. Even. Close.

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You get the feeling that the Internet is getting pretty big - or that your research skills are getting pretty good - when you start to find stuff like a link to the very drawing you've been asked to translate (albeit not already translated). Too bad the vendor didn't have a glossary of product terms on its site; it would've saved me mucho tiempo. Then again, the feeling could just be a combination of more stuff available and having gained experience digging it up.

Apropos of which, finding translated documents on the web is no bed of roses. Within the past couple of weeks, I've been asked to translate two small documents that I found - already, um, translated - early in the course of research. The "um" is there to highlight the fact that the translations were mediocre.

Would I ever be tempted to copy such stuff and submit it as my own? It's easy enough to say no when the quality is so bad, and while I don't think - ceteris paribus - that I'd have qualms charging client B for a translation done previously for client A, I'm very nearly certain I'd have major reservations with glomming a high-quality translation off the 'net and passing it off as my own.

And as far as reselling translations, I think circumstances have conspired to allow me to explicitly do this once, when several companies independently asked me to do the same sample translation for a project they were bidding on, and paid me for it. (Otherwise, come to think of it, the whole idea behind translation memory programs is to reuse old translations and sell 'em under new purchase orders!)

Getting too philosophical. The drawing file is gone, and I'll take care of the paperwork tomorrow. Time to relax.

Cheers...