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Having all sorts of fun... not!
Aug. 2nd, 2013 11:57 amA client sent a couple of items along with a "glossary."
Were that it was the same kind of document that had been sent along with a previous job, which is to say: so short and so far removed in context from the job at hand as to be utterly worthless.
No, this time, the document is 106 pages long. It is a Word document. There is an English-to-Russian section and a Russian-to-English section (actually, several of them), but since the only sensible way to find stuff is to do a search, so having two separate lists of terms only serves to confuse matters.
(I am reminded here of an early dead-tree glossary undertaken at NASA for Shuttle–Mir, which tried to be helpful by grouping terms under five broad categories. In practice, this meant that if you had no idea what category an unknown term might belong to, you might just have to look it up five different places before you could be assured the term was not in the book.)
I am also impressed by the number of "???" within the listings (presumably a shorthand for "maybe", with one or two appearing on each page, which does not inspire confidence). There is also a hefty section up front that is monolingual (for the most part) and seems to have the sole purpose of providing boilerplate for, e.g., job titles and names of agreements. While I can appreciate this being a work-in-progress, I'm also inclined to throw up my hands and cry: "Give me a break!"
There. That feels better.
Were that it was the same kind of document that had been sent along with a previous job, which is to say: so short and so far removed in context from the job at hand as to be utterly worthless.
No, this time, the document is 106 pages long. It is a Word document. There is an English-to-Russian section and a Russian-to-English section (actually, several of them), but since the only sensible way to find stuff is to do a search, so having two separate lists of terms only serves to confuse matters.
(I am reminded here of an early dead-tree glossary undertaken at NASA for Shuttle–Mir, which tried to be helpful by grouping terms under five broad categories. In practice, this meant that if you had no idea what category an unknown term might belong to, you might just have to look it up five different places before you could be assured the term was not in the book.)
I am also impressed by the number of "???" within the listings (presumably a shorthand for "maybe", with one or two appearing on each page, which does not inspire confidence). There is also a hefty section up front that is monolingual (for the most part) and seems to have the sole purpose of providing boilerplate for, e.g., job titles and names of agreements. While I can appreciate this being a work-in-progress, I'm also inclined to throw up my hands and cry: "Give me a break!"
There. That feels better.
