Weird sleep...

This past weekend was weird. Saturday was not too productive, but I figured that, with a mere 8 pages of PDF to translate for Monday morning (and the fact the client sent me reference files that were advertised as being very useful), there was nothing to worry about.

Boy, was I mistaken!

Now, PDF is often the only feasible way to "digitize" something that's been printed on a piece of paper, but there is something fundamentally wrong with people who routinely "print" Word files in PDF format and send the result out for translation. While such files are editable to a certain extent, the point of translation is, if you think about it, to edit everything. Every last phrase must be "edited" by replacing it with the translated equivalent. Not much fun at all. (And don't even get me started about formatting!)

So the only two viable alternatives for handing PDF files is to translate them the old fashioned way—by shifting your attention from the source text to a window where target text is being entered (and I have years of experience doing that, believe me)—or performing OCR on the file, editing the OCR into something usable, and then processing the OCRed file the usual way (i.e., with a translation memory program).

So I OCRed the 8-page document and learned that the text weighed in at just over 4,000 source words. I hadn't noticed that the typeface of the article was small.

So, it was not my idea of a fun Sunday, but I jumped in, and settled into a routine of translating some portion of the text, followed by a nap, followed by more translation and another nap, etc. until 3:15 this morning, when I got up one more time for the "final push" and finished the document (including the despeckling) a little after my client's 9 am. I'm really tired.

My Monday plans have been shot to aitch-ee-double-toothpicks, but that's okay. My bed is still in the next room.

Cheers...