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A real handful...
Oct. 21st, 2013 10:35 pmIt was Thumper's turn at the vet's today, and let me tell you, when this dog puts his mind to it, he can be quite a handful!
Of course, I already knew that. Clipping his nails, for example, is not easy for me to do, and when the staff at the vet's set about doing it (to minimize potential injuries when restraining the animal while drawing a blood sample) it took two of them to get the job done. In all other respects, however, Thumper behaved very well at the vet's, mostly.
The day went by fast after returning from the vet's office. Translations were completed, papers were scanned, and assignment of a new translation from an established but occasional client took over two hours to negotiate (to an ultimately successful conclusion). The work is one of those maddening jobs that consists of X words in "new" segments and Y words of "pretranslated" segments that must be edited, and the eternal challenge with such jobs is pacing oneself, because editing is (in terms of words per hour) is faster than translation, which means that a straight word count of what's left to do will be biased depending on how much editing and translation work has been done so far.
One approach to pacing would be to edit all the pretranslated segments first, and then go back and do the translations. This may, in fact, have the additional advantage of giving me an opportunity to get more familiar with terminology that's commonly found in the document. But this approach is disruptive to work flow, because it requires constantly turning the translation memory function off (to prevent "new" segments from being presented for processing once the previous "pretranslated" segment has been edited) and then manually skipping to the next chunk of pretranslated text, which may only be one segment long, after which the process is repeated.
Another approach would be to go through the "normal" way, translating new segments and editing pretranslated segments, and to create a macro that counts and displays remaining "new" words and "pretranslated" words. (I may as well add a calculation for "expected time left" as well.)
Something to sleep on.
Of course, I already knew that. Clipping his nails, for example, is not easy for me to do, and when the staff at the vet's set about doing it (to minimize potential injuries when restraining the animal while drawing a blood sample) it took two of them to get the job done. In all other respects, however, Thumper behaved very well at the vet's, mostly.
The day went by fast after returning from the vet's office. Translations were completed, papers were scanned, and assignment of a new translation from an established but occasional client took over two hours to negotiate (to an ultimately successful conclusion). The work is one of those maddening jobs that consists of X words in "new" segments and Y words of "pretranslated" segments that must be edited, and the eternal challenge with such jobs is pacing oneself, because editing is (in terms of words per hour) is faster than translation, which means that a straight word count of what's left to do will be biased depending on how much editing and translation work has been done so far.
One approach to pacing would be to edit all the pretranslated segments first, and then go back and do the translations. This may, in fact, have the additional advantage of giving me an opportunity to get more familiar with terminology that's commonly found in the document. But this approach is disruptive to work flow, because it requires constantly turning the translation memory function off (to prevent "new" segments from being presented for processing once the previous "pretranslated" segment has been edited) and then manually skipping to the next chunk of pretranslated text, which may only be one segment long, after which the process is repeated.
Another approach would be to go through the "normal" way, translating new segments and editing pretranslated segments, and to create a macro that counts and displays remaining "new" words and "pretranslated" words. (I may as well add a calculation for "expected time left" as well.)
Something to sleep on.
