Sources of pathology...

Historically, the folks who create the files I eventually translate have shown themselves willing to go to any length to get their document to say what they want and look how they want. In the more extreme instances of such behaviour, the resulting file acts in a very unstable manner, and I have taken to describing such files as "pathological."

Recently, I am finding myself dealing with one pathology after another, almost exclusively having to do with tables. In one document, editing the contents of a table cell causes the entire table to reformat itself, and not in a good way. In another, changing the width of a column causes merged cells to unmerge and show text in the "created" cells. In several instances, I've found that exiting Wordfast translation mode causes unwanted text ("droppings") to be left behind.

I am starting to seriously wonder if the problem lies in my source files, or in the environment (MS Word) I use to work with such files.

Cheers...

No good deed...

One of the inevitable consequences of the fairly useless "help" capability in Microsoft Word is a colossal number of pages on the Web that help explain how to do things.

Apparently in a fit of pique, the developers at Microsoft have taken the trouble to change things around with every iteration of the software, resulting in now having to look for not just "how to do X" on the Web, but "how to do X using version Y."

That last is not always as easy as it sounds. Bugger!

Never too rushed...

So there I am, looking at a label that says "спутники Марса" (literally, "satellites of Mars" or "Mars satellites"). This makes me think of the hardware we Earthlings have put into orbit around the Red Planet, and so, "Mars satellites" is what I typed.

But a look at the graphic on which this label appears shows two rocky lumps, which obviously are meant to represent the moons of Mars, Phobos and Deimos.

And suddenly, I am fighting this urge to replace "Mars satellites" with "Moons of Barsoom" (or better yet, "Hurtling moons of Barsoom," except there's really no room in the space allowed) just to see if anyone notices, or at least gets the reference.

This post scratches the itch, if you get my drift, but hasn't done away with it entirely.

There are about 6,000 source words in the document, siad number not including a bunch of words that didn't get OCRed for one reason or another. What did make it through the OCR process are scattered over 80+ pseudo-PowerPoint slides, due COB tomorrow.

Ahem!