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Play the harp...
Oct. 30th, 2012 11:06 pmI had my sixth tai chi session this evening, and compared with that first night, my stamina would appear to have improved. Go me.
On the way there, I recalled an experience from back around 1997 or so, when Natalie and I signed for a tae kwon do class together, which met twice a week at 6 pm. After a few weeks of this, I was called into my boss's office and was told that disappearing twice a week—leaving the office about 30-40 minutes after the end of the work day for everyone else—was an indication of a bad attitude toward work, and that such behavior was not acceptable, me being a manager and all.
At the time, I continued the sad tradition of placing work above my personal life that had started with my first engineering position, so I quit the tae kwon do class.
I don't know if it's just me or the reality of corporate employment, but it seems I've run into a consistent pattern at various companies I've worked at for upper management to say one thing ("we expect our employees to work hard, but to play hard, too!") but expect something else ("there's not time to play, nor will there ever be!"). That's part of what turned me off during my interview at Microsoft, where so many of the different individuals I was interviewed by seemed to make a point of not only telling me how—reputation to the contrary—the company welcomed my having a personal life, but used almost the same words to express that thought each time.
* * * The job I received last Friday was about 33% larger than I expected, due mainly to that 33% residing in a deceptively lightweight PDF file. While PDF may be a more convenient format in which to schlepp information from place to place, it is a translator-hostile format, as it is not realistically editable.
What I mean to say by this is that when you get a PDF to translate, you either have to take the time to pass the file through an OCR program to convert the text into an editable format (such as a Word document file) or you must rely on the traditional method of looking at the source (either in its own window or printed on a piece of paper) while entering the translation in a separate window. The problem with this latter approach is that besides promoting the commission of translation errors (sentence and paragraph omissions in particular), segregating the source and translation texts impedes the review process (which adversely impacts quality) and makes it much more difficult to find previously researched terminology (negatively affecting quality over the long term).
On the plus side (if viewed purely from a financial perspective), PDF source files translation pretty much has to be paid at a target word rate (the Russian word count "expands" when the text is translated into English) since agency project managers are typically not trained in the art of accurately estimating source word count using a ruler. Furthermore, any revisions made to the information in a PDF file will require a review of the entire document (else how are you going to find what's changed?), which can get expensive really quickly and furthermore, will adversely impact quality if—as I find is ever more frequent these days—correspondents go back and forth with multiple revisions of a document over a relatively short period of time. You can review and re-review the same text only so many times before your eyes cross and you start to miss changes.
It's getting late. Time to retire until the morning.
On the way there, I recalled an experience from back around 1997 or so, when Natalie and I signed for a tae kwon do class together, which met twice a week at 6 pm. After a few weeks of this, I was called into my boss's office and was told that disappearing twice a week—leaving the office about 30-40 minutes after the end of the work day for everyone else—was an indication of a bad attitude toward work, and that such behavior was not acceptable, me being a manager and all.
At the time, I continued the sad tradition of placing work above my personal life that had started with my first engineering position, so I quit the tae kwon do class.
I don't know if it's just me or the reality of corporate employment, but it seems I've run into a consistent pattern at various companies I've worked at for upper management to say one thing ("we expect our employees to work hard, but to play hard, too!") but expect something else ("there's not time to play, nor will there ever be!"). That's part of what turned me off during my interview at Microsoft, where so many of the different individuals I was interviewed by seemed to make a point of not only telling me how—reputation to the contrary—the company welcomed my having a personal life, but used almost the same words to express that thought each time.
What I mean to say by this is that when you get a PDF to translate, you either have to take the time to pass the file through an OCR program to convert the text into an editable format (such as a Word document file) or you must rely on the traditional method of looking at the source (either in its own window or printed on a piece of paper) while entering the translation in a separate window. The problem with this latter approach is that besides promoting the commission of translation errors (sentence and paragraph omissions in particular), segregating the source and translation texts impedes the review process (which adversely impacts quality) and makes it much more difficult to find previously researched terminology (negatively affecting quality over the long term).
On the plus side (if viewed purely from a financial perspective), PDF source files translation pretty much has to be paid at a target word rate (the Russian word count "expands" when the text is translated into English) since agency project managers are typically not trained in the art of accurately estimating source word count using a ruler. Furthermore, any revisions made to the information in a PDF file will require a review of the entire document (else how are you going to find what's changed?), which can get expensive really quickly and furthermore, will adversely impact quality if—as I find is ever more frequent these days—correspondents go back and forth with multiple revisions of a document over a relatively short period of time. You can review and re-review the same text only so many times before your eyes cross and you start to miss changes.
It's getting late. Time to retire until the morning.
