Treading on thin ice...

From a recently sent email:

Dear Ms. N.,

I was under the impression that you were contacting me on the basis of my having satisfactorily completed two previous projects for [your company] (for Ms. V.) in 2006 and 2007. With that in mind, I am at a loss to understand why another sample translation would be necessary.

I am also taken aback that [your company] would consider asking professional translators to do a sample consisting of 2,100 source words. Please forgive my frankness, but among my clients, files of such size are no longer "samples," but "assignments."

I may end up short one (not very active) client at this end of this, I don't know.

However, clients that ask translators to do overly large samples may have other bad habits lurking, as well.

Cheers...

UPDATE: The story has a happy ending, to the effect that payment is offered for the requested translations, which had not been made clear in the original email. Based on my previous relationship with this client (excellent, BTW), I am inclined to go along with this interpretation.

Will 'they' ever run out of slings and arrows...?

Today was one of those days that pushed me toward believing that computers can have malevolent personalities. In the end, though, I got almost 4,000 source words translated onto phosphor - although as I think I may have already observed, my turn of the phrase is already obsolete as I have not had a phosphor-based display in the house for some time.

Vista came up twice is some strange mode where every program that I attempted to launch would come up looking normal and then assume a "(Not responding)" state upon the first mouse click. Later in the day, an attempt to resume work from hibernation mode went nowhere; I ended up dumping all the recovery data just to see something appear on my screen.

In the middle of it all, Word sort of "lost" the ability to customize toolbars (which I noticed because the superscript and subscript buttons that had been on my edit toolbar apparently took a vacation, and I couldn't open the customize dialog box because the choice had been grayed out on the main menu). Fortunately, running Office diagnostics fixed the problem, though no clue was offered as to what the problem actually was.

And the summary of the day's computer fun would not be complete without mentioning that the mouse disappeared twice today, once from my secondary display, and once from the laptop's primary display.

I be just one lucky fella!

Heck, I almost felt as if I had spent more time waiting for Vista to reboot than working!

Anyway, I have 2600 words left to do tomorrow. I want to get them out of the way as early as possible, so I can fry some other fish. Time to go to bed, I guess.

Cheers...