Uncharitable thoughts...

Pretty much all translation memory programs "chunk" text into segments using various rules (e.g., "stop at a period"). One almost ironclad rule of segmentation is "stop upon encountering a carriage return."

Every once in a while, you run into a Word document where the originator decided to insert carriage returns by hand, for whatever reason. Such documents are a pain to work with, but you have a fighting chance to get rid of them in Word, if not by search-and-replace, then at least manually, by having Word display the carriage returns as paragraph characters.

Not so in PowerPoint (at least, to the best of my knowledge). You can't make paragraph marks appear, nor can you search for them.

This makes working with loads of inserted carriage returns a royal pain, so much so, it's almost not worth using any tools, unless you first "edit" slides by guessing where potential carriage returns might be and then attempt to delete them by hand.

This adds considerably to the time required to process the document, as you might imagine, especially considering the large amount of text there is distributed on some of the slides in the presentation in work right now.

Grrr...

I need to do another 40 slides...

For reasons known only to the originator of the current PowerPoint monstrosity, in addition using carriage returns ubiquitously where none are necessary, a decision was made on what appears to be a random basis to use some kind of strange font that looks okay, but which causes my screen to look as if an arthritic turkey had waddled across it with ink-stained feet should I be foolish enough to process it with a TM.

I dare not time how long it takes me now to "prep" a slide before attempting to translate it, for that plus the time taken to record said effort will certainly exceed the time it's taking to actually translate the sucker.

I actually need about 30 more slides to get to the halfway point; I want the extra 10 as a buffer for unexpected stuff (which goes under the rubric of "life") that may happen tomorrow.

Cheers...

For giggles...

I don't generally go for "tests," but figured I'd try one that purported to assess my Russian vocabulary chops. The results?

Я прошел "Тест на определение словарного запаса"

ВАШ СЛОВАРНЫЙ ЗАПАС - Результаты теста

Ваш словарный запас на высоком уровне! Великолепный результат. Вы ответили правильно на 25 вопросов из 35! Поздравляем!

Пройти "Тест на определение словарного запаса" здесь

A score of 25 out of 35 would've netted me a solid "C" back in junior high, so I'm not sure why the testing site assessed my result as "terrific" (other than, perhaps, not to hurt my feelings).

While it may be tempting to conclude "Not bad for a non-native speaker!", I must admit I was greatly aided by the large number of cognates used in the test (e.g., экстравагантный / ekstravagantniy, респектабельный / respektabelniy).

* * *I've bagged nearly 6,500 target words for the day, with just over 5,000 source words left for tomorrow, making tomorrow a somewhat easier day than today has been. This is a good thing, as my eyeballs are about ready to jump out of my head and beat me to death with anything within, um, view.

Cheers...