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Various...
Apr. 16th, 2007 07:50 pmI had become so used to be assigned the position of interpreter for the glavniy that I complacently neglected to pay close attention to my work assignment document. (Glavniy is one of the few Russian terms that has actually entered into English usage in the space program, denoting the glavniy operator, the member of the Moscow flight control team whose primary job is to speak with the crew.) For today's sim, I was assigned to the much more demanding slot of "space-to-ground" interpreter, where it was my job to simultaneously interpret (simulated) radio communications between the station and the MCC in Houston into Russian.
After a couple of glitches early in the training, I settled down and did a pretty good job, if I say so myself.
In other news, the invoice I sent to my client of last Friday and the weekend needed to be redone as three separate invoices (something I'll have to keep in mind for the future). It would appear that one of the ingredients for being a successful freelancer is to be flexible when it comes to such things. I'll just note that I'm about to send out my 60th invoice for the year, whereas a couple of years ago (2005, to be precise) I didn't hit invoice number 60 until sometime near the end of August or the beginning of September. Part of it probably has to do with the more demanding requirements on the part of clients (although Friday's client is the only one who takes this "separate invoicing" business seriously), but certainly another part is the fact that I'm doing more work.
I also got a note from my French client inviting me to install what is described as "a second generation translation memory tool" in preparation for eventually using it on projects. It used to be that clients were just interested in having you use something like Trados or Déjà Vu; now, it seems clients are coming up with programs for me download about once every couple of months. (And - following one of the principal corollaries Feht's Law - it's not likely that the primary thrust of any such initiative is any unbridled benefit to the translator. Still... it's worth a look, I suppose.)
Work offers came in by the truckload today, and I had to decline them all. Perhaps, if I had gone into "balls to the wall" mode (BTW, not a reference to what one might, um, innocently think!), then maybe I could have taken on some more work, but it didn't happen, so I couldn't. Still, then I may have missed an interesting correlation between translation and the quality of a PowerPoint presentation.
The rough cut of this epiphany goes like this: The presentation quality of a PowerPoint presentation is inversely proportional to its translatability.
At the one extreme, if the presentation consists of nothing but sentences arranged in landscape fashion on a slide, it'll be easy to translate, but it'll be a lousy presentation (I mean, you may as well pass the silly thing out as a printout and wait for people to finish reading it).
At the other, if the presentation consists largely of short, one- or two-word bullet points (which is a pretty good predictor of presentation quality, assuming the presenter has a grasp of the subject), then (ceteris paribus) it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to translate.
The key here is context.
(For example, even within NASA, the acronym ODIN can stand for at least two things that I've had to deal with personally (Onboard Data & Information Networks, a flight control room console position and call sign, and the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for NASA, which deals with stuff like passwords and hardware issues). So unless you have a real good idea as to the purpose of a presentation, just knowing that there's a bullet point "ODIN" in a NASA presentation isn't going to be enough.)
Today's offered PPT file was, by this standard, a fair to pretty good presentation, and had I accepted the work, it would've been a challenge to complete the assignment.
I napped briefly upon coming home, and need to do something for dinner, but the day/night is far from over: I need to get a good leg up on the assignment due Friday at noon, as my "holiday" over the weekend has put me at a disadvantage in that regard.
Cheers...
After a couple of glitches early in the training, I settled down and did a pretty good job, if I say so myself.
In other news, the invoice I sent to my client of last Friday and the weekend needed to be redone as three separate invoices (something I'll have to keep in mind for the future). It would appear that one of the ingredients for being a successful freelancer is to be flexible when it comes to such things. I'll just note that I'm about to send out my 60th invoice for the year, whereas a couple of years ago (2005, to be precise) I didn't hit invoice number 60 until sometime near the end of August or the beginning of September. Part of it probably has to do with the more demanding requirements on the part of clients (although Friday's client is the only one who takes this "separate invoicing" business seriously), but certainly another part is the fact that I'm doing more work.
I also got a note from my French client inviting me to install what is described as "a second generation translation memory tool" in preparation for eventually using it on projects. It used to be that clients were just interested in having you use something like Trados or Déjà Vu; now, it seems clients are coming up with programs for me download about once every couple of months. (And - following one of the principal corollaries Feht's Law - it's not likely that the primary thrust of any such initiative is any unbridled benefit to the translator. Still... it's worth a look, I suppose.)
Work offers came in by the truckload today, and I had to decline them all. Perhaps, if I had gone into "balls to the wall" mode (BTW, not a reference to what one might, um, innocently think!), then maybe I could have taken on some more work, but it didn't happen, so I couldn't. Still, then I may have missed an interesting correlation between translation and the quality of a PowerPoint presentation.
The rough cut of this epiphany goes like this: The presentation quality of a PowerPoint presentation is inversely proportional to its translatability.
At the one extreme, if the presentation consists of nothing but sentences arranged in landscape fashion on a slide, it'll be easy to translate, but it'll be a lousy presentation (I mean, you may as well pass the silly thing out as a printout and wait for people to finish reading it).
At the other, if the presentation consists largely of short, one- or two-word bullet points (which is a pretty good predictor of presentation quality, assuming the presenter has a grasp of the subject), then (ceteris paribus) it's going to be hard, if not impossible, to translate.
The key here is context.
(For example, even within NASA, the acronym ODIN can stand for at least two things that I've had to deal with personally (Onboard Data & Information Networks, a flight control room console position and call sign, and the Outsourcing Desktop Initiative for NASA, which deals with stuff like passwords and hardware issues). So unless you have a real good idea as to the purpose of a presentation, just knowing that there's a bullet point "ODIN" in a NASA presentation isn't going to be enough.)
Today's offered PPT file was, by this standard, a fair to pretty good presentation, and had I accepted the work, it would've been a challenge to complete the assignment.
I napped briefly upon coming home, and need to do something for dinner, but the day/night is far from over: I need to get a good leg up on the assignment due Friday at noon, as my "holiday" over the weekend has put me at a disadvantage in that regard.
Cheers...
