Regular expressions are my friends, continued...

Good morning all. I'm just coming off a night of very poor quality sleep, but I'll be okay.

Unfortunately, I'm not quite all there yet, so I didn't really need to run headlong into that quaint Russian habit of creating a pseudo abbreviation out of a word by replacing the body of the word with a dash, retaining typically two letters up front and one or two at the back. Example:

Установка отпарки отходов пр-ва серной кислотоы

After staring at the above for a full minute and trying to guess what "пр-ва" might stand for, I came up with a Find string in Word that does the trick fairly well:

<пр[а-я]@в

Interpretation: Starting at a word boundary, find the string "пр", followed by one or more lowercase Cyrillic letter(s), followed by a "в" (I don't care about the last "а", since that's an ending).

Right off the bat, this finds me "производство" (though granted, not with the "greedy" kind of matchup that would be so satisfying), which causes me to have a "I-coulda-had-a-V-8!" moment, as in retrospect, that's all it could be.

I. Need. Coffee.

Cheers...

Doing the math...

Hmmm. This document contains 7800+ words on 8 pages.

Can't you tell, the font size is minuscule?

There oughta be a society for the prevention of cruelty to translators, y'know?

Cheers...

Neologism?!

Just now, in responding to a comment left by LJ friend rjlippincott, I started to muse about how my situation could be... less optimal, i.e., I could be doing this mess in PowerPoint, and it occurred to me that - as my very favorite program to transate in - it should really be called PowerPoink, for obvious onomatopoeic reasons.

Google says its eternally vigilant band of spiders have previously found "PowerPoink" a total of 8 times, so I'm not entirely original with this neologism, but who knows? Who cares? I think it's apt, if not actually trespassing over on the side of cute.

Can you tell my heart really isn't in this 7800-word... text? The good news is, though, that there's quite a bit of repetition in it, so that getting it done by the end of the day is eminently feasible (I am, in fact, more than halfway through, and blessing Wordfast as it does the grunt work.)

Cheers...

Lucky walk...

Upon finishing today's slug of work, I took Shiloh for a walk around the neighborhood. Along the way, I hoped to run across the "sculpture" of a chicken, made of old garden implements welded together, that I once saw at the entrance to a place that sells fresh eggs (for $4 a dozen) not far from here on Peacock Lane.

The same place is home to at least two peacocks, and as I started to record a video, more for the sounds of the other birds in the air than for anything else (nothing was moving), the peacocks chimed in.

Check it out:

Cheers...