Common Sense and the Art of Long-Haul Translation...

I've done enough long-distance driving to have realized that there's not much you can do, really, to speed things up when traveling from, say, New York to Colorado. Oh, you can press down a little harder on the accelerator, and in this way get about 50 miles further down the road than you would otherwise in the same amount of time, but unless you are willing to do the whole Burt-Reynolds-as-the-Bandit schtick, it's still going to be a grind.

The same is true for translation, except for those delicious moments when you jump into warp drive because you've run into a section of text that you've already translated before (perhaps in a previous version of the document), and now your translation memory supplies something reminiscent of afterburner.

Sadly, there's no way that can happen with my current job, which concerns surveying.

As a result, I end up with that same "long-haul" feeling as I sit behind the keyboard, realizing that I can't work faster than I am at the moment, and that has the potential of being a real mind-killer.

So, after completing a little more than half of my self-imposed quota (4,000 source words), I got up and went shopping for food. Specifically, I went shopping for the ingredients to LJ friend bandicoot's Hearty Ten-Bean Chicken Vegetable Soup.

I was intrigued by the recipe, because it looked a little like gilding the lily (chicken vegetable and beans?), but also because it was pretty straightforward, and I was in the mood to cook.

So for a couple of hours, I followed the recipe, and the result?

Marvelous!

My only complaint thus far has to do with my lack of self-control, as I've already had three portions.

Anyway, it's time - I think - to shut down the computer for the night and, um, waddle upstairs. Tomorrow is another long-haul day of translation.

Cheers...