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Productive...
It was a good day for translation, I think.
Client T from Houston calls first thing in the morning. Ten pages, due soonest. No sweat.
Client G from Chicago follows up on an e-mail from a couple of days ago and sends me a two-page fax. Again, no sweat.
Client M from Houston had sent me a 120-page document yesterday with some really weird instructions about what, exactly, the end client wanted translated. I'd looked at the file early this morning and figured it'd take me longer to count the words I translated than it would to actually translate the words. Time estimate: 3-5 hours, depending on how good my eyesight was during the review. The thing is due tomorrow afternoon, which is why I felt confident about accepting the two other jobs mentioned above.
In this case: sweat. But not because of time constraints... at least not directly.
I have rarely seen such a "document." It is possible that a thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand computers running Word might come up with something having more formatting problems, but I wouldn't take any bets on it.
This was, indeed, an extreme case of "shoehorning" words onto a page, since I ran across an extraordinary number of places where adding or deleting a letter would cause strange things to happen to the formatting (color changes, font size adjustments, disappearance of bullets, just to name three).
I've completed the beast and will look at it again tomorrow.
* * * A couple of weeks ago, one of my old coworkers asked me to write a letter in support of his petition to the INS to classify him as an alien of exceptional scientific skill. I was happy to write it, but the "samples" that his attorney sent sort of made my jaw drop.
Apparently, I'm supposed to write something that tells the INS what a cool guy I am, and only then should I actually say anything about Alex (the guy who's applying). It took me a while to get over my natural modesty, but after a couple of belts of Jameson's and reading a couple of chapters of a marketing book that shall go unmentioned, I finally sat down and let loose. I finished a few minutes ago and sent my draft off to see how well it flies with Alex's lawyer.
* * * The problem of the disappearing roads on the GPS maps displayed by my Palm were, indeed, the result of not converting the color bitmap that GpsDrive fetched from Expedia into a plain black-and-white image. I redid the maps and now the roads show up fine.
* * * There's still a pile of translation left on the plate. Time to go rest up and prepare.
Cheers...
Client T from Houston calls first thing in the morning. Ten pages, due soonest. No sweat.
Client G from Chicago follows up on an e-mail from a couple of days ago and sends me a two-page fax. Again, no sweat.
Client M from Houston had sent me a 120-page document yesterday with some really weird instructions about what, exactly, the end client wanted translated. I'd looked at the file early this morning and figured it'd take me longer to count the words I translated than it would to actually translate the words. Time estimate: 3-5 hours, depending on how good my eyesight was during the review. The thing is due tomorrow afternoon, which is why I felt confident about accepting the two other jobs mentioned above.
In this case: sweat. But not because of time constraints... at least not directly.
I have rarely seen such a "document." It is possible that a thousand monkeys pounding on a thousand computers running Word might come up with something having more formatting problems, but I wouldn't take any bets on it.
This was, indeed, an extreme case of "shoehorning" words onto a page, since I ran across an extraordinary number of places where adding or deleting a letter would cause strange things to happen to the formatting (color changes, font size adjustments, disappearance of bullets, just to name three).
I've completed the beast and will look at it again tomorrow.
Apparently, I'm supposed to write something that tells the INS what a cool guy I am, and only then should I actually say anything about Alex (the guy who's applying). It took me a while to get over my natural modesty, but after a couple of belts of Jameson's and reading a couple of chapters of a marketing book that shall go unmentioned, I finally sat down and let loose. I finished a few minutes ago and sent my draft off to see how well it flies with Alex's lawyer.
Cheers...