Done... mostly.

[alexpgp]

It took me nearly 4 hours to take care of the little "extras" that the client wanted incorporated in the work. Specifically, the instructions call for all graphics and equations to be included in the translation.

Yech. I'd forgotten just how mind-numbing it is to cut and paste graphics, and the fact that my workhorse desktop runs on a "relatively" ancient 300-MHz CPU inside of 64 MB of RAM and a pitifully small hard drive, and mind-numbing-ness just gets worse as the system's performance degrades.

I'm impressed, though. Through it all, my desktop only crashed once.

In any event, the figure captions weighed in with another 700 words, which brings the final total to 19535 words, which I shall have to invoice as soon as humanly possible after sending the job in.

I started to review the work after I finished with the graphics, but I feel I'm too close to it right now. The problem is, even if I rip through the part I translated at 3,000 words per hour, it will take nearly a full day to just read the thing (this assumes I don't refer back to the original).

What makes me less than deliriously happy right now is having found more mistakes than I care to see (especially when I'm this close to the work) after having spent an hour spot checking the parts I translated towards the end of the three sessions over which the work was done. So... I think I will invest a couple of hours tomorrow morning and look at those areas again, and then just spot check the work.

* * *There is a vague feeling of a lack of something in my life. I suspect if I were to review my posts for the past, say, month, they would tell a sad tale of preoccupation with work.

I'm good at what I do; that's no lie. Indeed, the alacrity with which I jump at new jobs may simply be a way of avoiding facing up to some stark realities, as if working real hard will solve my other problems.

Is this what being a workaholic is all about? Am I a workaholic?

I certainly don't want to work all the time. I want to get out and walk in the woods, and go visit friends, and go watch movies, or just sit and do nothing. I realize that life is not one big vacation, but it seems to me more and more that there is no time for any rest or relaxation, except in very rare, brief intervals. Am I being unreasonable?

June, you're the month I make a concerted effort to change course, at least a few degrees.

I know I can do it. I must...

Cheers...

Cheers...

Comments

[brenk.livejournal.com]

I think we have some parallel thought waves. Just spend a most frustrating weekend on 26 pages of telecom technical brochures plus life insurance regulations, wondering why I wasn't out in the garden, walking, etc. etc. or simply *having* a weekend. I finished it all last night, and also have to start the re-read and tweaking. Tomorrow, I hit Estonia for a report-writing job for 4 days. Which will mean next weekend typing that up, followed by the weekend after back in Lyon for another one. And this is *summer*.

It's *hard* to refuse a translation (or other) job, particularly as there is no way of knowing when the next one will come, and of course the mortgage payments aren't negotiable. Is it partly fear of 'will the flow or work and/or the capacity to cope with it ever stop'?

I keep trying to assess your speed, but this is also tricky since hereabouts translation is usually counted per line of 52.5 (yes, honestly) characters, not by word, of target text. On a good day I can get through about 800-900 lines, i.e. 42,000-47,000 characters, depending on text complexity and language. But as I keep telling people, this is on a day when the juices are flowing, and what's more I've been at this game for 23 years.

Off to double check some telecom-speak. UPS is not just a courier service, it's a trademarked system for uninterruptible power supply in server farms *g*.

[kf6gpe.livejournal.com]

The balance between work and the rest of life is always difficult, even more so when you're contract-based. After recommitting to "life" (outside of work, I mean!) after my son was born, I promptly went off and accepted three contracts to do books when I really should have only taken the first. Some of it was excitement, and some of it was fear, as Brenk suggests above. And if you love what you do --- which I gather from your posts you do --- that makes it even more challenging.

I can't say you're a workaholic -- only you can say that. Instead, I urge you to take a deep breath, go outside, walk around, and kick it around with those around you that know you best, and maybe take a couple of days to really enjoy yourself and think about things other than work!