Ch-ch-changes...
May. 21st, 2017 11:59 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpThere 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...
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...
