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Trust, but verify...
Feb. 12th, 2012 08:21 pmGood advice for politicians, even better advice for translators.
A company named in my current assignment is now said to be in the business of selling something called, in Russian, an авторучка (avtoruchka). The prefix, avto-, generally echoes the idea of auto- in English—i.e., "self," as in automatic, automobile, autonomous—which is used broadly enough and frankly, can mean anying at all. At the back end, ruchka has a number of meanings that include "handle," "knob," "lever," and "pen."
Quite a number of sources suggest "fountain pen" for "авторучка," but a little Web research shows the company in question does not sell fountain pens (although they do sell a line of executive roller ball pens). Not to worry, however: the Russian word is apparently one of those wonderful "Humpty Dumpty" words, in that—within reasonable limits—it pretty much means whatever its user wants it to mean.
Generally speaking, it's tough to figure out just how far I've gotten in the current assignment, mostly because my discipline in moving linearly through a document after it's been ripped apart by memoQ is not all that great. It is way too easy to have the application display segments out of order.
The most common way this happens in my case is when I want to display all segments in a document that contain a certain Russian word because I found a better translation for it. Once I deal with all segments translated so far, instead of leaving the search mode, my eye will often look at the "next" occurrence of the word, which appears in a segment located after my current progress point.
Counting linearly from the beginning, however, I have completed the first 223 "segments" out of 715, plus some number of segments from the rest of the document, not including about 70 segments that are already in English because they appear in the source text of the document.
And so, the bottom line is this: I'm ahead of where I have to be and behind where I expected to be.
* * * In other news, the one remaining garage door controller left in the house stopped working about ten days ago, a battery replacement did nothing, and a visit to the manufacturer's web site revealed a price of about $40 for a replacement unit, plus shipping. Since it's always a good idea to have a spare garage door opener around, just in case, that meant we were looking at an expenditure of about $100 or so, the prospect of which didn't exactly have me squirming with joy.
So, on a hunch, I decided to see if any such openers were on sale on eBay. There were, and at a more reasonable price point of about $20 a pop, shipping included. Both units—purchased from different sellers—arrived yesterday. Both work. Problem solved.
* * * The rank sentimentalist that lurks in the back of my head decided to see if I could track down an obituary for Mr. Adolphe, who I mentioned in yesterday's post, but my search was cut short by finding a post with not only his name in it, but also the names of most of my other teachers (including some whose names I had forgotten), written by someone born the same year I was, who attended that same junior high school.
What particularly caught my attention was how the poster described music class as being for "band and orchestra" (i.e., brass/woodwind/percussion, as string players were in the "orchestra" class) and recalled the names of French (not Spanish) teachers. I was in that "band and orchestra" class (as the lone baritone horn player) and I also took French, so basically, that meant I spent three years in the same class as the poster. (And today, that hunch was proved right, for whatever that's worth.)
And so it goes.
Cheers...
A company named in my current assignment is now said to be in the business of selling something called, in Russian, an авторучка (avtoruchka). The prefix, avto-, generally echoes the idea of auto- in English—i.e., "self," as in automatic, automobile, autonomous—which is used broadly enough and frankly, can mean anying at all. At the back end, ruchka has a number of meanings that include "handle," "knob," "lever," and "pen."
Quite a number of sources suggest "fountain pen" for "авторучка," but a little Web research shows the company in question does not sell fountain pens (although they do sell a line of executive roller ball pens). Not to worry, however: the Russian word is apparently one of those wonderful "Humpty Dumpty" words, in that—within reasonable limits—it pretty much means whatever its user wants it to mean.
Generally speaking, it's tough to figure out just how far I've gotten in the current assignment, mostly because my discipline in moving linearly through a document after it's been ripped apart by memoQ is not all that great. It is way too easy to have the application display segments out of order.
The most common way this happens in my case is when I want to display all segments in a document that contain a certain Russian word because I found a better translation for it. Once I deal with all segments translated so far, instead of leaving the search mode, my eye will often look at the "next" occurrence of the word, which appears in a segment located after my current progress point.
Counting linearly from the beginning, however, I have completed the first 223 "segments" out of 715, plus some number of segments from the rest of the document, not including about 70 segments that are already in English because they appear in the source text of the document.
And so, the bottom line is this: I'm ahead of where I have to be and behind where I expected to be.
So, on a hunch, I decided to see if any such openers were on sale on eBay. There were, and at a more reasonable price point of about $20 a pop, shipping included. Both units—purchased from different sellers—arrived yesterday. Both work. Problem solved.
What particularly caught my attention was how the poster described music class as being for "band and orchestra" (i.e., brass/woodwind/percussion, as string players were in the "orchestra" class) and recalled the names of French (not Spanish) teachers. I was in that "band and orchestra" class (as the lone baritone horn player) and I also took French, so basically, that meant I spent three years in the same class as the poster. (And today, that hunch was proved right, for whatever that's worth.)
And so it goes.
Cheers...
