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A little knowledge...
Aug. 15th, 2015 10:28 pmSo the document that was supposed to hit my inbox this morning finally arrived in the afternoon, and I got acquainted with Yet Another New Translator™.
YANTs generally come highly recommended, and a number of them make a real good first (non-translation-related) impression. The proof of the pudding, however, lies almost literally between the lines.
What makes this job similar to other recent editing jobs in which I had no knowledge of the source language is the fact that the source language here is Spanish. What keeps the job from being, essentially, identical in nature—i.e., relying solely on one's subject matter expertise to determine what does not make sense in the target test and then fixt it—is a sort of middlin' level of Spanish text comprehension.
Comprehension, however, had to take a back seat for most of the afternoon and a chunk of the evening, because the document cried out to be reformatted, away from the nightmare of crap imposed by an OCR program (which, for all I know, might very well have been FineReader, if it was set to output something more ambitioius than "formatted text," which is my preferred setting).
Still, some things could not help but attract my notice. For example, what started out as "areas" in the text eventually became "zones"; units were incorrectly attributed; numbers expressed in 'E notation' were incorrectly rendered; and though I could go on, I'll cut the list short because I want to save some of that "fire in the belly" generated by such goofs for the actual editing job tomorrow.
This particular YANT doubtless did a better job than I would have done on a Spanish text. I just hope tomorrow's efforts do not make me a liar in this regard.
Tomorrow is going to be a really big day.
YANTs generally come highly recommended, and a number of them make a real good first (non-translation-related) impression. The proof of the pudding, however, lies almost literally between the lines.
What makes this job similar to other recent editing jobs in which I had no knowledge of the source language is the fact that the source language here is Spanish. What keeps the job from being, essentially, identical in nature—i.e., relying solely on one's subject matter expertise to determine what does not make sense in the target test and then fixt it—is a sort of middlin' level of Spanish text comprehension.
Comprehension, however, had to take a back seat for most of the afternoon and a chunk of the evening, because the document cried out to be reformatted, away from the nightmare of crap imposed by an OCR program (which, for all I know, might very well have been FineReader, if it was set to output something more ambitioius than "formatted text," which is my preferred setting).
Still, some things could not help but attract my notice. For example, what started out as "areas" in the text eventually became "zones"; units were incorrectly attributed; numbers expressed in 'E notation' were incorrectly rendered; and though I could go on, I'll cut the list short because I want to save some of that "fire in the belly" generated by such goofs for the actual editing job tomorrow.
This particular YANT doubtless did a better job than I would have done on a Spanish text. I just hope tomorrow's efforts do not make me a liar in this regard.
Tomorrow is going to be a really big day.
