Wholly heck!

It was a good thing I looked at all the files from a prospective new client, because two of them involved style issues, and I got the feeling, as I went through the text, that some not insignificant part of the evaluation of my work will be based on how well I've hewn to the style rules.

It goes to something I've maintained for quite some time in this profession: language skill is not the ace of trumps in translation. For example, a translator who cannot (or will not) use a keyboard and do work with a word-processing program is not of much use, even if the quality of their work is near-perfect.

When I worked in-house in Houston, we did have occasional candidates for employment show up who didn't know how to use a computer, but offered to hand-write their translations. Uniformly, these individuals could not understand what the big deal was with having to hire a typist to transcribe the written pages and then spend time proofreading what had been typed before handing the end product over to the editors (who for some time after I came on board had their own set of problems).

Anyway, the sample is gone, as is work that came in this morning. There is still work on the plate, which I plan to take care of this afternoon.

* * *In other news, I hit the rack last night at around 11 pm, and although I did find it somewhat difficult to fall asleep, it did not take inordinately long to do so, and once I did, I slept pretty soundly until about 5:30 this morning, when Hana and Micky started a best-two-falls-of-three feline wrestling match on the bed and woke me up.

Cheers...