AlexPGP's Corner

It is a matter of dealing with piles. And not piles of anything; just "piles."

As in "long things that are embedded in the ground to support buildings and such." And in particular, one kind of pile, but I get ahead of myself...

As I have come to understand it, a буронабивная свая is:

• an in-situ pile (according to Multitran, which also gives bored pile and drilled pile as alternatives),
• a bored pile, according to the title of a paper I'm using as a reference,
• a situ-cast pile, according to another paper title,
• a bored situ-cast pile, according to yet another paper title,
• a pile cast in a hole predrilled in soil, according to yet another paper title (which is more a description of what happens than of what this blessed animal is called.

Moi, I tend to like bored situ-cast pile, as it tends to capture the essence of the thing (drill a hole, pour cement in it).

Strangely, however, as the other variations appear in the titles of papers being cited in this article I'm translating, I am pretty much forced to use said renderings.

No biggie. With any luck, I shall finish this journal today and take a load off my mind.

Cheers...

How shall I translate thee? Let me count the ways...

Just kidding.

I ran across the following in the Hays translation (2002) of Meditations, by Aurelius:

VI.6. The best revenge is not to be like that.

And since I have two other translations handy, I could not resist a comparison. First, from the venerable translation by George Long (1862):

VI.6. The best way of avenging thyself is not be become like the wrong-doer.

And finally, from the translation by the Hicks brothers (2002), published under the title The Emperor's Handbook:

VI.6. The best revenge is not to do as they do.

As my knowledge of Greek barely extends to asking for another glass of ouzo, I will certainly not presume to suggest which of these three is the "better" translation, as all three state the same basic idea.

My gut tells me that the Long translation, stodgy as it is, tries the hardest to follow the thought patterns embedded in the original Greek, come hell or high water. Consider the following, from that translation:

VI.8. The ruling principle is that which rouses and turns itself, and while it makes itself such as it is and such as it wills to be, it also makes everything which happens appear to itself to be such as it wills.

I don't know about you, citizen, but it took me a couple of passes through this text to conclude that it sounds like some kind of riddle you'd expect in a tale of sword and sorcery. Compare that to the same "meditation" in, say, the Hays translation:

VI.8. The mind is that which is roused and directed by itself. In makes of itself what it chooses. It makes what it chooses of its own experience.

I will refrain from saying this is "better," but it sure as blazes is more comprehensible, at least to this citizen of the twenty-first century.

Cheers...

As a marvelous example of how not to do things ("Fire! Aim! Ready!"), I finally visited the Payment Practices web site to look up an outfit out of Chicago—it would be Chicago (go figure)—that does business as Cosmopolitan Translation Bureau, for whom I did a couple of small jobs a while back, the invoices for which remain unpaid.

Had I done that before undertaking work for them, I would never have agreed to do it, as Cosmopolitan apparently has quite a long history of non-payment. I've sent them a reminder, just for the heck of it, but I won't be terribly surprised to hear nothing back.

The good news is that the adverse financial impact due to this faux pas of mine is not so large as to make me cringe.

File this also in the Lessons-Learned Dept....

Every once in a while, your friendly, neighborhood translator is gobsmacked by an abbreviation that shows up in a document seemingly out of nowhere and, naturally, demands attention.

Take, for example, the Russian abbreviation "САР" (—please!) in a document I'm working on. To my credit, I realize there's a better than even chance that the last two letters stand for анализ риска (risk analysis), but without knowing what the first letter expands to, I may as well just transliterate the abbreviation (SAR) and move on, as it were.

That is, except for one sturdy little straw that's available for the grasping, involving a search using wildcards. Consider the following string:

[а-я]@

In Microsoft Word's variant of wildcard code, this means "one or more occurrences of any lower-case letter between 'а' and 'я'." If one tacks the character 'с' to the front, like this:

с[а-я]@

followed by a space, performing a search will find every instance of a word of at least two letters whose first letter is 'с'. Continuing with this logic,

с[а-я]@ а[а-я]@ р[а-я]@

will find three consecutive words, of two or more letters each, that begin with 'с', 'а', and 'р', respectively (I use lower case because Russian is generally pretty sparing when it comes to capitalizing words).

I hit paydirt with the second successful "find":

системный анализ риска

or "system risk analysis."

There are times this technique will not work, but it's almost always worth a try when you're up against it.

Cheers...

I may have gotten turned around somewhere on the details, but a very long time ago, my mother introduced me to ghee, which I understand to be clarified butter with all of the water boiled out of it, leaving behind a golden liquid that I love to cook with.

Ghee tends to be a pretty pricey item in most health food stores (a 16 oz jar runs for about $10 in Durango, and it's about $12, if memory serves, at the recently opened market here in Pagosa), but if you don't mind standing over a stove for about 20 minutes, you can make about that much for the price of a pound of butter (and the energy it takes to melt it and boil out the water).

The basic procedure consists in melting the butter over moderate heat and then watching it—listening to it, actually—until it stops bubbling. The cessation of bubbling means the water in the mixture has boiled away, at which point I turn off the heat and let the process continue for a minute or two. If you cooked the butter over medium heat, you do not risk burning the product by finishing it off this way.

Typically, all of the solids will have migrated to the bottom of the pot, but I use a small piece of cheesecloth to filter out the few remaning solids that refused to sink. First, however, I pour the liquefied ghee into a quart Pyrex measuring cup and prepare the ghee container (a wide-mouthed screw-top jar) by running hot water over the outside surface. Then I pour the ghee through the cheesecloth into the jar, screw on the cap, and let it sit for a little while before putting it in the fridge.

The wide-top of the jar helps in digging out the product for use in cooking, and the ghee itself gives a nice taste to the food you prepare with it.

* * *One of the things that perennially drive me nuts about Russian is the language's seeming insistence on using formulations of the form:

Питер больше чем в два раза меньше чем Москва

[St. Petersburg] is more than two times smaller than Moscow

The engineer in me protests. It's the word "times" that does me in, I think. The word screams "multiplication" at me, but multiplying anything by a number greater than one doesn't result in a number that's smaller than what you started with.

A few moments of reflection make clear what is intended. Something that is "two times smaller" is "half the size"; "three times smaller" is "one-third the size." In a recent translation, however, I ran across something that was "1.5 times smaller," which—using the pattern of inverting the number, i.e., 2 becomes 1/2, etc.—is the same as 1/1.5, or "two thirds the size."

The example above contains an additional nuance: it says one city is "more than two times smaller," implying (for the sake of argument) "more than two and less than three," and ultimately, if you run the thought process to the end, you arrive at the following:

[St. Petersburg] is less than half the size of Moscow.

I will admit to a certain amount of laziness in the past, in going along with the "x times smaller" wording in English. In the future, unless I risk adding some kind of ambiguity into my translation, I think I will pursue the more native style of English expression.

Cheers...

If lettering on a graphic in a PowerPoint slide is not legible when in full-screen display mode, then it doesn't matter that such text can be made legible by copying the graphic, zooming in by 400%, applying a contrast filter, and then running the result through an OCR program that uses DARPA neural network algorithms.

It's illegible.

Just sayin'.

Cheers...

An unsolicited email crossed my router today, for a huge into-Russian job. I don't work into Russian, but the rate offered intrigued me. I knew it was low, but could not determine how low by inspection, because "X per page" made no immediate sense to me.

Most payments I deal with involve word count. I started in this business doing translations based on a source word count that was, of necessity, based on the kind of technology that was used to calculate column-inches of text back when Linotype represented the apex of publishing technology (i.e., a ruler and a pencil). The advent of computers made it easy to count words, and since determining source word count from paper documents was so cumbersome and prone to error, counting the number of words in a target language file became the standard way of charging for the work.

In other countries, work is paid on the basis of lines or pages of standard "size." Today's into-Russian project specified a payment of "120 to 130 rubles per standard page," where a standard page is defined to be 1800 characters, including spaces.

After finishing the work I had received early this morning, I rummaged through my archives to find some representative group of assignments and recorded the word count and character count so conveniently provided by Microsoft Word. (By the way, throughout this post, what I refer to as "character count" should be interpreted as including spaces.)

Excel helped create the following x-y scatter chart using my data.


There's nothing really unexpected in the linear nature of the line on the graph, and the result supports the idea—one that goes back to the early days of telegraphy—that a "word" in English consists of five letters plus a space, or 6 characters in all (although technically, the number is more like 6.3 according to the data of my informal analysis).

Today's exchange rate between rubles and dollars (obtained by entering the search string "exchange rub usd" into Google) is just about 30, so the maximum offered rate is

130/30 = $4.33

to be paid for

1800/6.3 = 286 words,

which allows us to determine a target word rate of

$4.33/286 = $0.0152,

or basically a penny-and-a-half a word.

Not my cup of tea.

I'll just file away that 6.3 chars/word figure. It may come in handy some day.

恭喜发财

The job's not finished yet, but a couple of items have been driven home over the course of reviewing very nearly 200,000 words of translation.

First, watch out for the overuse of the word "also," especially in constructions along the lines of "and also" (e.g., "The company will try to sustain performance and also to introduce new technologies.)

There is a hazard as well in the premature (and, in my opinion, superfluous) appearance of "also," as in the sentence

Other countries attempting to accelerate biofuel production have also encountered problems similar to those experienced in the United States.

I find it's a little jarring to be hit with that "also" like that, its placement reminds me of the instruction "turn left where the barn used to be" given to the lost motorist in the old joke about the city-slicker and the New England farmer. The sentence reads perfectly well without the word:

Other countries attempting to accelerate biofuel production have encountered problems similar to those experienced in the United States.

In short, I've found that a significant percentage of "also" occurrences can be deleted without harming the text. Maybe it's a peccadillo of this particular translation, but still...

Second, it's almost always possible to get rid of fluff like "We should note that..." For example,

Looking back at history, we should mention that on October 8, 1975, at a scientific session de­voted to [a branch of scientific research, an eminent person gave a speech about energy.]

At the very least, the "we should mention that" can be dropped to read

Looking back at history, on October 8, 1975, at a scientific session de­voted to [a branch of scientific research, an eminent person gave a speech about energy.]

And frankly, I think the sentence survives very well - and the overall text reads smoother - in the following form:

On October 8, 1975, at a scientific session de­voted to [a branch of scientific research, an eminent person gave a speech about energy.]

I really should get back to work, even if my heart isn't really in it. I can hear Galina packing upstairs.

Cheers...

The assignment I got upset about on Friday went and got me upset again tonight, as I was finishing it, but thank goodness the work is done. This post just may be catharsis.

I feel as if advantage has been taken of me a second time, and the question foremost in my mind is: Should I say nothing and just refuse future work from this project manager, or should I make an issue of it?

You see, when I invoiced a recent job with this project manager, I was suddenly told that certain jobs - including the one I had completed - were paid on a source word count basis, and that I should resubmit my invoice.

I won't dispute that, had I undercharged the client and been told to amend my invoice, you never would have seen this post. As it turns out, however, the source rate yields a smaller payday because Russian word count is, generally speaking, between 15% and 25% smaller than the English word count for a given slug of Russian text. When I mentioned that I had not received any such notification, the issue was quickly resolved in my favor, though I was asked to keep this policy in mind for future jobs.

Anyway, the job that arrived Friday arrived with a flawed source count (the source document is a PDF, which raises its own questions), and obviously, the count was low. But that's not what annoys me the most. What really irks me is that most of the assignment involved contract language, which tends to weigh in toward the high end of the expansion scale.

Will you tolerate a short digression? Here's an example:

Russian source:
Таможенный брокер обязуется способствовать в рамках законодательства Российской Федераций сокращению сроков таможенного оформления декларируемого товара Заказчика.

English translation, sort of:
The-(Customs Broker) obligates-self to-facilitate, within the-framework of-(Russian Federation) law, reduced-time-for customs clearance for-the-Customer's declared goods.

The hyphens cause the English words to roughly "chunk" to the corresponding Russian words (which doesn't always work, by the way, but my digression digresses...). The difference in word count between the source and target is -1 (the English is actually one word shorter, but again, I wander further afield...).

Getting rid of the hyphens and changing the wording slightly obtains my translation:

The Customs Broker agrees to facilitate reduced customs clearance time for the Customer's declared goods within the framework of Russian Federation law.

That's 22 words instead of 16, a nearly 40% expansion in this case. And this happens a lot in contracts.

So between the undercount and the expansion factor the end result is that I've put in a lot of effort, gotten the job done, and again feel as if I've been taken for a ride.

And in the course of tapping out this post, I've decided I'm just going to send in the job with no comment, along with my invoice, and just not accept any more work from this project manager. Life is just too short, and I should have probably put out this fire back on Friday.

Lesson learned.

Cheers...

P.S. BTW, here's Google's translation of the same source text:

Customs Broker undertakes to contribute to the law of Russia shorten the duration of the declared customs clearance of goods of the Customer.

The competition has a way to go, thank goodness.

During our morning coffee, Mike brought up a deal that he had become involved with, involving a customer that wanted some pretty expensive flooring to be shipped to Sweden (talk about sending coals to Newcastle!).

The more he described the deal, the "itchier" I got, until finally I couldn't take it any more and Googled some of the salient points of the transaction, which revealed that the whole thing is... a scam.

In other news, I just sent an email response to a client who now says work originally assigned for noon Friday is due tomorrow morning (at the end client's insistence).

Heck, about half of today is gone, y'know?

So, basically, I withdrew from the assignment. Part of my email reads:

The deadline and range of materials to be handled (30 MB of reference documents, a 12K word source file, a file with "pretranslated segments," a second file with more translated segments) will not allow me, in my opinion, to provide a quality product in the time available.

Seeing as how I've been in a dry spell the past couple of weeks, the conventional wisdom would say "take any and all work," and I did actually make a concession in this job with regard to the percentage of "pretranslated" segments therein (I try to keep them to no more than 10% of the job).

However, if there's one thing chess has taught me, it has been to carefully consider the unconventional, which in this case translates into potentially losing a job if I feel uncomfortable doing it, no matter how much my wallet doth protest.

The client has called (which I sort of expected). Back to work.

Cheers...

UPDATE (10:41 am): The job has been canceled. In the end, I think this is for the best.