The start to what will be a great day!

An old friend reminded me recently of my habit, back in the day, of turning an unpleasant task into a game of sorts. And I just ran across an example of it.

Back in high school, French was pretty much my only stumbling block in terms of studies, which in retrospect was a good thing, else I would have snoozed my way through all of my last two years of high school.

After all this time, I can't decide whether the coincidence of having a French teacher for a mother was a help or a hindrance. It meant lessons both at school and at home. Conversationally, my mother was not of much help, as she was more interested in cultivating perfect pronunciation than in conversing, with the result that—upon my utterance of anything in French—she'd lead me in repeating the uttered words and phrases over and over again until (I guess) she was tired. In mimicry as in memorization, mindless repetition only gets you so far.

Another form of torture she devised was the compilation, by hand, of what she called "verb charts." In retrospect, I can see that this was her way of codifying her preferred method of learning, which was to write things out. (Something that I learned to do, too.)

A verb chart basically summarized all of the conjugations of the various tenses, arranging them in five columns. After a chart was completed, it could be used as a reference (or it could be written out again).

In any event, a day or so ago I ran across a chart I had written for the verb être, and in the lower right-hand corner, in the same ink and hand, there is a notation—4:26—indicating how long it had taken me to create the chart.

After four decades, I can only note that my penmanship could have been better.

Galina will likely start heading back to these northern climes tomorrow, which means I should get a fire lit under the current assignment, so as to leave me some time to do some, er, tidying up.

To work!

Cheers...

Interesting terminology...

I was not able to find any good translation for "система оперативно-разыскных мероприятий," and one suspects there really isn't one, at least not outside the boundaries of close-to-literal translation.

The words "разыскных мероприятий" refer to "investigative activities" or "investigative functions." Easy enough.

"Оперативный" (and its variants) is an often-encountered word that, in my mind, has a meaning that exhibits aspects of "in a brisk, workmanlike manner," "without undue delay," and "in the course of usual operations." The cognate "operational" is often forced into service here, simply because no other good alternative comes to mind and time is short. I've also seen "real time" (as in "the committee deals with new issues in real time"), but don't like it.

There are also times when the word need not be translated at all (similar to the collocation "технологический процесс," where the first word can often be ignored, leaving the cognate "process" in the engineering sense, e.g., "Has anyone seen the process flow sheet?"). This characteristic, it occurs to me, is a mark in favor of "operational," simply because in many contexts, it's not a word that conveys a whole lot of meaning.

But, as it turns out, the phrase "оперативно-разыскные мероприятия" does appear in Multitran, as "investigative work," but I don't like it for the term at hand.

Interestingly, what the system does is a far cry from its rather innocuous name. Here's an excerpt desbribing the system's operation, from the mindwar.ru site:

Аппаратура СОРМ устанавливается на АТС и у провайдеров интернет-услуг, а пульт дистанционного управления располагается в подразделениях ФСБ. Система СОРМ позволяет контролировать исходящие и входящие вызовы абонентов, по команде из пункта управления осуществлять разъединение установленного соединения, конспиративно подключаться к любым абонентским линиям, в том числе находящимся в состоянии соединения, а также осуществлять необходимую запись, перехватывать и читать электронную почту. В принципе СОРМ даёт возможность не только читать электронную почту, но и производить съём любой входящей Система оперативно-разыскных мероприятийи исходящей информации российских пользователей при их работе в Интернете.

SORM equipment is installed at automatic telephone exchanges and Internet service providers, while the remote control panel is located at FSB subdivisions. The SORM system allows monitoring of a subscriber's incoming and outgoing calls, allows established connections to be broken by a command from the control center, enables covert connection to any subscriber lines (including those in the connected state), as well as performing necessary recording, interception, and reading of electronic mail. In principle, SORM provides an ability not only to read electronic mail, but also to read any information entering the Система оперативно-разыскных мероприятий when Russian users employ the Internet. (my translation)

For the purposes of my immediate assignment, I think I shall use the very nondescript "System of Operational Investigative Aids," and keep moving!

<grin>

Cheers...

UPDATE: One of the things I've noticed occurring in the course of a translation is how the recurrence of a term in various contexts will affect the way I decide to render a term. It is, in fact, one of the reasons I detest submitting work in pieces, because invariably, shortly after sending in a chunk of work, I'll find something that needs improvement (if not outright correction, although that's rarer).

After seeing "оперативно-разыскные мероприятия" a couple of more times in the text I'm working with, I am of the opinion that my first impression was right (ignore "operational") and that I should understand the "мероприятия" to refer to activities, as opposed to the thing used in those activities.

So, as of noon, it's "System for Investigative Activities."

Starting to feel the strain...

The day started with about 8400 words to translate, with about 3,000 or so of those words scattered about in "pretranslated segments" that I'm being paid to edit instead of translate. In this case, the task is not be too bad, as the quality of the pretranslated text is reasonably good.

It's difficult to gauge how well you're progressing when there are such segments in an assignment. From 3:30 pm to 4:30 pm today, for example, I managed to translate/edit almost 1500 words, probably because most of them were in pretranslated segments and, as a result, the text passed quickly under my eyeballs. Earlier, from 1 pm to 2 pm, I managed about 600 words.

Still, I just did a word count of what's left to do, and the number is just under 2,000 words. With that kind of number, it really doesn't matter how many of them are pretranslated, as it should not take me too long to translate such a quantity tomorrow morning even if there are no pretranslated segments in what's left (and I know there are, here and there).

Not to mention I'll probably knock off in about half an hour, after which I'm planning on doing a whole lot of nothing.

After dinner.

Cheers...

Saith the Emperor...

Plainly, no situation is better suited for the practice of philosophy than the one you're in now.

— Marcus Aurelius, XI, 7