A good day for translations...
Mar. 26th, 2003 08:45 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
alexpgpMy cell phone rang in the middle of doing the report this morning.
Can I do three pages for tomorrow?
You betcha!
My phone rang again a little after noon.
Can I incorporate some edits to a translation for tomorrow, say, by noon?
You betcha!
The first item was sent and invoiced earlier in the afternoon.
The second I finished a little while ago. I felt compelled to work on it until I was either finished or had gone through enough of the document to assure being able to finish tomorrow morning.
Incorporating edits into a translation can be a dirty, rotten job, even if the edits are marked in revision mode. Just so we're clear on what's going on, the idea here starts with the fact that document A has been translated into another language (resulting in document B). Document B, in turn, has been edited... some things added, others deleted, still a third group tweaked with minor insertions and deletions. Call the result B'.
Now the translator, with the revised document B' in hand, must go back to the original (document A) and make the same changes so that the result (call it document A') reflects the content of B'. Still with me?
The major pitfalls in this rather straightforward arrangement are these:
1) Unless the people on the side reading document B are very conscientious, it is not uncommon for someone to make changes in the text that are not done in revision mode. The end result now has changes in it that will never make it back to the original, unless a line-by-line comparison is made.
2) Unless the people on the side reading document A are very conscientious, it is not uncommon for someone to have made changes in the text in revision mode or not, before making the document available to the translator so that changes can be incorporated from B'.
Typically this leads to a Real Bad Situation™, to wit: receiving instructions that limit your task (and concomitant compensation) to "incorporate only the bits in revision mode," followed by indignation (and amnesia regarding your instructions) over all of the mismatches between source and target texts after you are finished.
So of course, the instructions appear in my invoice, despite the fact that my client really has a good handle on all of this.
Anyway, I will give the text another once-over tomorrow morning and then send it off. It's not as if anyone is in the office now to receive the file.
Cheers...
Can I do three pages for tomorrow?
You betcha!
My phone rang again a little after noon.
Can I incorporate some edits to a translation for tomorrow, say, by noon?
You betcha!
The first item was sent and invoiced earlier in the afternoon.
The second I finished a little while ago. I felt compelled to work on it until I was either finished or had gone through enough of the document to assure being able to finish tomorrow morning.
Incorporating edits into a translation can be a dirty, rotten job, even if the edits are marked in revision mode. Just so we're clear on what's going on, the idea here starts with the fact that document A has been translated into another language (resulting in document B). Document B, in turn, has been edited... some things added, others deleted, still a third group tweaked with minor insertions and deletions. Call the result B'.
Now the translator, with the revised document B' in hand, must go back to the original (document A) and make the same changes so that the result (call it document A') reflects the content of B'. Still with me?
The major pitfalls in this rather straightforward arrangement are these:
1) Unless the people on the side reading document B are very conscientious, it is not uncommon for someone to make changes in the text that are not done in revision mode. The end result now has changes in it that will never make it back to the original, unless a line-by-line comparison is made.
2) Unless the people on the side reading document A are very conscientious, it is not uncommon for someone to have made changes in the text in revision mode or not, before making the document available to the translator so that changes can be incorporated from B'.
Typically this leads to a Real Bad Situation™, to wit: receiving instructions that limit your task (and concomitant compensation) to "incorporate only the bits in revision mode," followed by indignation (and amnesia regarding your instructions) over all of the mismatches between source and target texts after you are finished.
So of course, the instructions appear in my invoice, despite the fact that my client really has a good handle on all of this.
Anyway, I will give the text another once-over tomorrow morning and then send it off. It's not as if anyone is in the office now to receive the file.
Cheers...
