There's nothing like a kick the butt...

...to get one going, especially on Sunday!

I had promised a rather large job for "Sunday" without specifying what time, so of course the client assumed I meant by about noon or so, whereas by 11 am I still had 2700 source words left to do.

When email failed to rouse me (I only look like I am joined at the hip to my email), I got a call asking when the translation would be delivered, and we settled on a deadline of 5 pm ET (which just happens to be the deadline for this week's LJ Idol entry, but I digress...).

Fortunately, if you do this sort of thing long enough, and if you're well acquainted with the jargon, it's possible to (crosses fingers) really plow through the text. I even managed to despeckle the thing, to a degree.

Now I am completely spent. I think I'll go do my vegetable impression for a while, and contemplate the fluid dynamics involved in emptying a can of beer. Or two.

Cheers...

Passive aggression, or...?

The assignment I got upset about on Friday went and got me upset again tonight, as I was finishing it, but thank goodness the work is done. This post just may be catharsis.

I feel as if advantage has been taken of me a second time, and the question foremost in my mind is: Should I say nothing and just refuse future work from this project manager, or should I make an issue of it?

You see, when I invoiced a recent job with this project manager, I was suddenly told that certain jobs - including the one I had completed - were paid on a source word count basis, and that I should resubmit my invoice.

I won't dispute that, had I undercharged the client and been told to amend my invoice, you never would have seen this post. As it turns out, however, the source rate yields a smaller payday because Russian word count is, generally speaking, between 15% and 25% smaller than the English word count for a given slug of Russian text. When I mentioned that I had not received any such notification, the issue was quickly resolved in my favor, though I was asked to keep this policy in mind for future jobs.

Anyway, the job that arrived Friday arrived with a flawed source count (the source document is a PDF, which raises its own questions), and obviously, the count was low. But that's not what annoys me the most. What really irks me is that most of the assignment involved contract language, which tends to weigh in toward the high end of the expansion scale.

Will you tolerate a short digression? Here's an example:

Russian source:
Таможенный брокер обязуется способствовать в рамках законодательства Российской Федераций сокращению сроков таможенного оформления декларируемого товара Заказчика.

English translation, sort of:
The-(Customs Broker) obligates-self to-facilitate, within the-framework of-(Russian Federation) law, reduced-time-for customs clearance for-the-Customer's declared goods.

The hyphens cause the English words to roughly "chunk" to the corresponding Russian words (which doesn't always work, by the way, but my digression digresses...). The difference in word count between the source and target is -1 (the English is actually one word shorter, but again, I wander further afield...).

Getting rid of the hyphens and changing the wording slightly obtains my translation:

The Customs Broker agrees to facilitate reduced customs clearance time for the Customer's declared goods within the framework of Russian Federation law.

That's 22 words instead of 16, a nearly 40% expansion in this case. And this happens a lot in contracts.

So between the undercount and the expansion factor the end result is that I've put in a lot of effort, gotten the job done, and again feel as if I've been taken for a ride.

And in the course of tapping out this post, I've decided I'm just going to send in the job with no comment, along with my invoice, and just not accept any more work from this project manager. Life is just too short, and I should have probably put out this fire back on Friday.

Lesson learned.

Cheers...

P.S. BTW, here's Google's translation of the same source text:

Customs Broker undertakes to contribute to the law of Russia shorten the duration of the declared customs clearance of goods of the Customer.

The competition has a way to go, thank goodness.