Payback for breaking the rules...

I slept well, despite the rather "intense" nap I took late yesterday afternoon. In fact, I probably would have slept longer, but Shiloh just could no longer stand not being fed (and hey, it was 6:45 am!).

Against my better judgment, I accepted an assignment on Friday from my old aerospace client (who had previously contacted me for work last September, to give an idea of how often opportunities like this come around), and if I had to point to one overarching issue I've encountered, it's that I've bloody well forgotten altogether too much terminology that used to flow freely from my lips and fingertips (and more important, what said terms mean, on occasion).

For example, I spent the last quarter-hour trying to figure out whether motion vector" (вектор движения) is the same thing as—i.e., different way of saying—"velocity vector" (вектор скорости), and my addled-brain conclusion is that the two are different, which makes life difficult, as the originator of the document I'm working with uses the terms interchangeably.

So be it, however. These terms will appear as written in the source document.

Upon finishing this assignment, I'll have to start editing the humongous file that arrived yesterday morning—a file that had been promised for last Monday—from a translator who is convinced his armpits smell better than anybody else's armpits (my DI's in boot camp would've expressed the same sentiment somewhat differently, but I digress...).

There are few things that will hold back a translator than intransigence in the face of editing. Toss in tardy delivery and things get much worse.

Enough of that. Today is a great day to have a great day!

And I plan on having one, see?

Cheers...

Ch-ch-changes...

There was a time when translation assignments arrived via either fax machine or courier, because the material to be translated consisted of hard copy.

I strongly suspect that's the reason why payment (at least hereabouts) relied on target word count (something that came "built in" with word processors), since getting an accurate source word count was not possible, and while estimating the number of source words on hard copy was not all that hard, it did take some time and accuracy was linked to experience and said copy appearing in monospaced letters.

There followed a long period of assignments arriving in the form of application files, e.g., word processing files, spreadsheet files, PowerPoint files, etc., which was a boon, generally speaking, as they provided an editable base upon which to start working.

With the assignment I just finished (except for one last eyeballing I have scheduled for tomorrow morning), I noticed that for some time now, my client has been receiving documents for translation in PDF format.

Yech!

I managed to salvage something usable from my OCR of the file, but in the end, what should have been a 4-5 hour job turned into an 8-hour slog. (Come to think of it, the last 3 hours or so involved reformatting the final product to resemble what arrived.)

Ah, well. It's work.

Now to take a short break, have some of Alla's borshch, and "turn to" on the editing job.

Who knows? I might be able to pull this off!

Cheers...

Editing blues...

I've 2,500 words or so left to edit, out of over 15,000 that I started with this morning.

I would be tempted to finish the work this evening, but I just decided I don't need to pick up a truck tomorrow morning first thing. That can wait until I eyeball today's earlier translation and finish the edit.

I am beat, let me tell you. In a way that has nothing to do with my health.

Cheers...