Orwell got the year wrong, that's all...

Via the Daily Express:

The Children’s Secretary set out £400 million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV supervision in their own homes.

They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals.

Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction.

Apparently, such households are or will be called "sin bins," which I find deliciously ironic.

For comparison, the $104 million in cuts made recently to the entire U.S. budget amid many impressive pronouncements from on high amount to about one-eighth what the Brits are prepared to spend (£400 million is about what? nearly $700 million?) on 24/7 monitoring of a trial population.

And you know it's only a trial. I mean, a goal like this is too good not to experience "mission creep," right?

Cheers...

Editing segments from other translators...

Clients increasingly use translation memory to save money, by having translators "edit" segments from previous work done by others that resembles segments in the current job. Translators don't get paid as much for "editing" as they do for translation.

Why do I put "editing" in quotes? Well, back when I worked in-house for one of my clients, we basically took the criterion used by the American Translators Association, which the organization uses as the yardstick for "entry level proficiency," and adapted it to our situation. For example, if an editor found more than one major error per 250 words of text, it was considered cause for concern; finding two such errors within what amounts to one page of text was considered evidence of incompetent work.

With that in mind, consider that segments to be "edited" generally contain at least one major error per sentence, or - if we charitably assume an average of 25 words per sentence - about ten major errors per page. Some maintain that such work is no longer editing, but retranslation.

I do, but I just work here.

Whatever it is called, editing a client's pretranslated segments may have another, potentially deleterious outcome waiting in the wings if quality control at the client company is lacking. At best, this effect is an annoyance; at worst, it can adversely impact the overall quality of submitted work.

As an example, the document I'm translating/editing right now has "acquisition parameters" as a 100% match for "технические условия," strongly suggesting that my client is comfortable with that rendering. The problem is that "acquisition parameters" provides nothing near the meaning of "specification," which is the fairly standard rendering of the Russian source term.

Heck, even the literal and very nearly completely useless "technical conditions" is not as glaring an error as "acquisition parameters."

The bottom line is this: Seeing this kind of stuff awakens a little voice in that lazy, shirking, goldbricking part of the mind that all of us seem to have, urging us to not exert ourselves any further, because what we're already doing is better than what the client is apparently used to getting.

Listening to that voice is a sure-fire route to what motivational speaker Zig Ziglar calls "stinkin' thinkin'."

I've resisted the voice and not let it affect my attitude, but the awareness of that temptation is an annoyance. Fortunately, there are only 400 words or so left, so it won't be an annoyance for long.

Cheers...