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Dan Lucas 
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | This is how the world returns | Feb 6 |
As the dog and I make our way northward down the eastern edge of the woodland in which we take our morning walk, at the far end of our regular loop, I catch something out of the corner of my right eye. I turn to look east into and across the large field that borders the trees, but see nothing. I resume walking and again I have the sense of something just beyond my sight, so I turn off my head torch and wait a few seconds for the dog and his flashing LED collar to trot off into the distance.
... See more As the dog and I make our way northward down the eastern edge of the woodland in which we take our morning walk, at the far end of our regular loop, I catch something out of the corner of my right eye. I turn to look east into and across the large field that borders the trees, but see nothing. I resume walking and again I have the sense of something just beyond my sight, so I turn off my head torch and wait a few seconds for the dog and his flashing LED collar to trot off into the distance.
With all light sources gone, I realise that what I have glimpsed in my peripheral vision is actually a very faint lightening of the sky on the horizon, which has become a shade of purple so deep as to be almost indistinguishable from black. This tells me that soon we will be in the season of early dawns for our morning walks.
Looking at last year's record I see that the first dawn photo (above) I took was on the 3rd of March, and the general blurriness of the shot indicates that the camera on my venerable Samsung S8 smartphone was having difficulty in the low light. So we have another three weeks or so, and then three or four weeks after that we will be too late for the dawn and instead the sky will be light when we go round. A couple of days ago I noticed that the snowdrops are flowering in our garden. The birds have started to become more vocal as well. Mae'r gwanwyn yn dod, yn wir.
Yesterday I completed about 6,000 characters of work, so it was a decent shift from my perspective, and by the end of it my old back injury was paining me. Today I have about the same amount to get through, but I suspect I will get some help from the translation memory on one of the projects I need to complete by midnight.
In other news, a client pinged me for availability yesterday on a 12,000 character project next week, right in the middle of the busiest period. On the assumption that some of the projects around that time will come in with less volume than currently projected, I accepted the job anyway (it's an interesting little company).
The content is a notice of convocation for the shareholders meeting (株主総会招集通知). Such documents must contain a list of the proposals for which the approval of shareholders is required, and typically this includes proposals to elect or re-elect directors and auditors. This often leads to the need to translate career summaries for these individuals, which means lots of researching proper nouns related to organizations for which they previously worked and which sometimes no longer exist. This is inefficient and frankly not very interesting, but work is work and I have to take the rough with the smooth.
If all the other jobs around the time of this newly accepted project come in at the volume estimated then I will struggle to fit everything in, but I will get through somehow. Fortune favours the brave, and all that.
This morning I have already had an offer of one job for later in the month, only 2,000 characters (accepted, because the final third of the month is looking quite open at the moment), and something related to an existing project of only a few hundred characters. Busy busy busy.
Time to get to work.
Dan ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas wrote:
Finally, it's about me trying to get a sense of my workload and order inflows that is not reliant on revenue, which is unavoidably distorted by foreign exchange rates.
1. Why don't you push the foreign exchange risk onto your customers?
2. Surely you record the amount of characters in each job for invoicing purposes?
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Christopher Schröder wrote:
1. Why don't you push the foreign exchange risk onto your customers?
Because it's not an undiluted negative - I benefited a great deal from the strength in the yen between 2015 and 2016 for example. Even if I had wanted to change, I suspect locking into sterling at a nine-year high would be a poor trade.
Also, as I have mentioned many times in the past, Japanese business culture values stability, and I don't want to rock a boat that is moving steadily forward. Given the existence of credible competitors, I wish to avoid anything that could increase the friction of transactions.
To give you an example, when I started out, two of the companies with which I work were unhappy even about the thought of sending money overseas and stated their preference for a bank account in Japan (!). We did manage to work around that, but still one of my clients requires me to explicitly request, every month, that the money is sent to my UK corporate bank account.
This may all sound very odd to you, but it is hard to overstate the sheer conservatism of Japanese clients in general, and those associated with the financial industry in particular. I have only ever had one client that was willing to open a Wise account to pay overseas freelancers with minimal fees, and he was effectively a one-man company (and unfortunately I found him very difficult to work with).
2. Surely you record the amount of characters in each job for invoicing purposes?
Perhaps surprisingly, I don't maintain my own central record of invoices. All but one of my Japanese clients provide me with a list of jobs which I check and confirm - I do not provide my own invoice. Those PDF files are my record, and the formats, as you can imagine, are quite varied. Programmatically extracting that data would be tricky.
I do provide invoices to European and UK clients, but I have not maintained a centralized tally of those jobs. Of course, if I had consistently entered that data every month into a spreadsheet right from the start, I would have something to which I can refer. I think I did try that at one point, but I didn't stick to it.
Going back over what is now nearly a hundred months of data to manually collate volumes for each client is a non-urgent project I have been saving for a quiet period, which has never come!
Finally, I like coding and I learnt a little bit from this particular project.
Dan
[Edited at 2024-02-06 10:26 GMT]
| | | | TonyTK
German to English
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| Searchin'n'Driftin' | Feb 7 |
Dan Lucas wrote: Not sure if this is the vehicular equivalent of sugar for my honey but it'll have to do.
Here's me thinking you surely can't be old enough to be acquainted with Merseybeat. Sweets For My Sweet as performed by The Searchers was the first 45 single I bought as a kid. I've just discovered that even that was a cover version. The original was by The Drifters (1961), and one of the background singers on that recording was the amazing Dionne Warwick (https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=walk%20on%20by).
Probaby no one under 65 will understand any of this ...
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
I injured my back when I was 19, somehow triggered it in 2022, and hurt it again while chainsawing a rather large windblown tree into pieces last week. I'm convinced that one of the proximate causes of the 2022 incident was the fact that I had been spending 8-10 hours in a chair every day. It was a good chair, but even a good chair can only do so much.
So now I stand to work, and although this means that I shift around a lot at my desk rather than being rooted to my seat I do get ti... See more I injured my back when I was 19, somehow triggered it in 2022, and hurt it again while chainsawing a rather large windblown tree into pieces last week. I'm convinced that one of the proximate causes of the 2022 incident was the fact that I had been spending 8-10 hours in a chair every day. It was a good chair, but even a good chair can only do so much.
So now I stand to work, and although this means that I shift around a lot at my desk rather than being rooted to my seat I do get tired, especially when I have to crunch through a good chunk of work as I did yesterday. I finished the large project and went through a couple of smaller jobs for a total of around 8,000 characters.
I have no active projects at the moment, although I will likely receive a small job today for completion by tomorrow, and there are three others that are due to be handed off to me today, the largest of which is estimated at around 10,000 characters (but I suspect will probably come in a good deal lower than that). I am waiting for the emails to drop into my inbox.
The other thing on which I will have to spend some time over the next few days and weeks is provisioning and preparing a new laptop PC that arrived yesterday. I have been using a low-end desktop PC that I bought secondhand in 2020 for about £200, and it has performed way beyond my initial expectations. For various reasons I want the option of being more mobile in future, so I have bought a mid-range gaming laptop.
Specifically this is an ASUS TUF F15 with an i7 CPU and RTX4060 graphics. Nothing cutting-edge, nothing blazingly fast, but substantially faster than what I have at the moment. I am not sure that the desktop PC's lack of processing power has held me back, but I'm beginning to suspect that Dragon Naturally Speaking would work better with a faster CPU. I wanted the Nvidia GPU because their Cuda platform can be useful for certain AI/machine learning applications.
Over the past couple of decades I have accumulated a large collection of specialized utilities and application software, as well as a fair number of scripts in various programming languages to help me in my day-to-day work. Recreating the environment on a new PC therefore takes time and effort. It is unlikely that I will be using the laptop as my main work machine for some time yet.
I also need to pop into town to visit the butcher ↓ and do a couple of other errands.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
TonyTK wrote:
The original was by The Drifters (1961), and one of the background singers on that recording was the amazing Dionne Warwick
Tony, I think the website is having problems again because your post was invisible to me earlier.
Anyway, I was unaware that the version I knew was a cover until I started looking for it online, then I found the Drifters, then the Searchers. I guess most of us prefer the version that we first hear, and assume by default that it is the original.
I'm not a big fan of reggae (perhaps more accurately I have no real cultural connection nor exposure to it) but at about the time this song came out I was working on an audit somewhere near Rickmansworth out to the north-west of London. I was about 25, and living in the Docklands back then so it was a long old way. I used to navigate to Baker Street and catch a mostly overground line from there.
This song has stuck in my memory because I was humming it on the Metropolitan line platform one morning while waiting for the train. As I stood there I noticed a very trim and pretty girl, who with her tan looked vaguely Mediterranean, wearing a short summer dress and gladiator sandals with the thongs wrapped up and around very toned calves. It was a hard look to pull off, but she did so with elan! That association has never faded, and whenever I hear the song I wonder who she was and where she was going. Funny how the mind works.
Dan
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Yesterday morning I could see stars only in a patch of sky directly above our heads, but despite the cloudy sky a band of lighter dark was still visible on the horizon. This morning it is raining and there is nothing I can see in the gloom except the dog's pale rump a few yards ahead of me, his tail held vertical and oscillating slightly as he trots cheerfully onward.
Yesterday we also encountered a vulpine reek at various points on our walk, not only on the outward journey and at t... See more Yesterday morning I could see stars only in a patch of sky directly above our heads, but despite the cloudy sky a band of lighter dark was still visible on the horizon. This morning it is raining and there is nothing I can see in the gloom except the dog's pale rump a few yards ahead of me, his tail held vertical and oscillating slightly as he trots cheerfully onward.
Yesterday we also encountered a vulpine reek at various points on our walk, not only on the outward journey and at the corner where a dog fox marks his territory but also on the return leg. Reynard may well have flitted silently across the path behind us only seconds after we passed; foxes are surprisingly tolerant of human presence once acclimatised.
I do not keep hens or livestock and thus tolerate them in turn, but I suspect that the farmer further up the hill has problems in lambing season. We have never seen one on a morning walk (fox, not farmer), but I would be surprised if the dog could get close to one: foxes are tricksy runners, and fleet of foot.
So now I am older
Than my mother and father
When they had their daughter
Now what does that say about me?
Oh, how could I dream of
Such a selfless and true love
Could I wash my hands off
Just lookin' out for me?
Speaking of people washing their hands of something, a 10,000-character job that was supposed to come in yesterday has not arrived, and the project manager in charge is suspiciously quiet. I have pinged her with a query: has this been canceled or should I keep in my schedule for now? Until she gets back to me I am helpless - I cannot reassign the capacity until she gives me the okay.
A different job, estimated at a similar 10,000 characters, has come in at between 2,000 and 3,000 characters. Suddenly my schedule is looking a lot emptier than it was 24 hours ago. Given that I appear to have caught the head cold from which my younger son was suffering from a few days ago, this relaxation of my schedule is not actually unwelcome. My nose is running and my voice is nasal and croaking, which is proving noticeably difficult for the voice recognition software to interpret.
Head cold notwithstanding, I need to complete about 4,000 characters today. One of the documents is the script for a presentation to be used by a senior manager at an end client involved in the auto industry. I know this company well, as I translate their documents every quarter. The other job that needs to be submitted by this evening is for a high-tech manufacturing company that I (somewhat unusually) have not even heard of before. I guess I will learn something new today.
In other developments, I was able to open up the laptop yesterday and confirm that it is possible to insert an additional M2 SSD, which I then ordered from Amazon UK. I also managed to overcome an obscure issue with the Windows network so that I can access the drive from my old PC, which is a necessary part of copying data during the migration.
Dan
PS In search of photos to offset the rain outside, I found this one taken in the covid summer of 2020, looking west from the top of the hill at Carnedd Meibion Owen tors to Newport Bay, three miles away as the crow flies, with Carningli to the left
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Ask and ye shall receive | Feb 8 |
Two minutes after my previous post, the project manager gets back to me. Yes, the notice of convocation project is still on, but about half the size previously estimated, and the files have been uploaded. I shrug, pop up to the portal, download the Phrase files for use in the desktop editor, check that they are good and that I have the necessary permissions, then shoot off thanks and confirmation.
At more or less the same time, a different project manager offers me 8,000 characters ... See more Two minutes after my previous post, the project manager gets back to me. Yes, the notice of convocation project is still on, but about half the size previously estimated, and the files have been uploaded. I shrug, pop up to the portal, download the Phrase files for use in the desktop editor, check that they are good and that I have the necessary permissions, then shoot off thanks and confirmation.
At more or less the same time, a different project manager offers me 8,000 characters for delivery later in the month, which I accept with alacrity. In my work directory I create a folder to represent the project, with the name of the folder including information on the volume, deadline, and expected hand-off date.
I check my schedule again: am I expecting anything else this morning? No, that would seem to be it for today. I have something coming in tomorrow, but I'll cross that bridge when I come to it. I have enough to do for the next eight hours, and I have a cold and a bad back to nurse, and I'll need to install the SSD in the new laptop after lunch if the Royal Mail delivers as expected. (Round here they are very reliable, and I know most of the postmen by name.)
So. Onwards and upwards!
Dan ▲ Collapse
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | The freelancer's lot is not always a happy one | Feb 9 |
It has been a long and physically painful week for me, but hopefully yesterday was the peak, or nadir, depending how you see it. My head cold resulted in an endlessly runny nose, and the frequent sneezes were agonising for my lower back. My left eye watered so often, and needed wiping so often, that the eyelid is slightly bruised.
If I sit down for any length of time, my back is painful when I stand up, and if I stand up I get tired. I have been standing up to work for nearly two ye... See more It has been a long and physically painful week for me, but hopefully yesterday was the peak, or nadir, depending how you see it. My head cold resulted in an endlessly runny nose, and the frequent sneezes were agonising for my lower back. My left eye watered so often, and needed wiping so often, that the eyelid is slightly bruised.
If I sit down for any length of time, my back is painful when I stand up, and if I stand up I get tired. I have been standing up to work for nearly two years now, so it is not normally a problem but the past few days have been hard.
It is at times like this that one realizes the fragility of the freelancing life. If I was engaged in a standard corporate position I could just call in sick, but I have 10,000 characters to complete by Monday morning. That work represents jobs booked well in advance by my clients, jobs that are related to earnings season disclosure and therefore are both critical and time-sensitive. No, nations will not rise and fall as a consequence of my withdrawal from a project, but it is a serious issue for the end clients in question.
Of course, if I just said "I can't do it" they would probably be able to find somebody else. But they would remember, and if I were to withdraw again from pre-booked projects because I had a runny nose, I have no doubt there would be repercussions. Dependability is a big part of why get decent flows of work from my clients, and that is a two-edged sword.
Would it be any different if I worked for a direct client? Yes, it would probably be worse, because there would be an even higher level of dependence by the client on my work. Unlike an agency they would not have straightforward access to other translators. If the president were going out to meet investors in the U.S. next week, then it would not be an option for me to say "Oh, sorry, I'm not feeling great, so I won't be able to complete the translation of the CEO's presentation on time." If that happened I suspect they would never rely on me for a critical project again. Or maybe any project.
I acknowledge autre pays, autre moeurs, and maybe other cultures would have less of a problem with this, but the stability and (for want of a better word) loyalty that Japanese companies typically extend to their suppliers is not by any means a free lunch. You are expected to be dedicated to your client.
My apologies for the slightly downbeat tone of today's post, but the question of whether translation is a line of work that we can or should recommend to younger workers is hotly debated on the forum. This is one of the aspects of freelance translation that comes down firmly in the "negative" column, and there's no point in sugarcoating it.
Dan
PS trying to strike a more positive note, today's picture is of a promising morning, courtesy of Kawase Hasui
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | The clock of my whole being is slow | Feb 10 |
For the first time in several days the dog and I can see stars when we go out for our morning walk. The Big Dipper hangs clear and bright above our heads as we come out onto the open track at the far end of the woodland, but the eastern horizon is already lightening. The primroses and daffodils of spring lie only three weeks ahead of us.
Unusually for this time of day, I hear the sound of a plane far above us, but even though I pause and search the sky I see nothing. I spot a couple... See more For the first time in several days the dog and I can see stars when we go out for our morning walk. The Big Dipper hangs clear and bright above our heads as we come out onto the open track at the far end of the woodland, but the eastern horizon is already lightening. The primroses and daffodils of spring lie only three weeks ahead of us.
Unusually for this time of day, I hear the sound of a plane far above us, but even though I pause and search the sky I see nothing. I spot a couple of things that seem to move, which are probably satellites. When I was a child looking up through my father's binoculars at the night sky from the yard of our dairy farm there were hardly any. I want to say that the world has changed, but it occurs to me that in a strictly literal sense these artificial stars are above the world, rather than in it.
The swift satellites show
The clock of my whole being is slow
...as RS Thomas put it. I should not complain, as it is the Starlink satellite antenna currently sitting on a garden table on the lawn that provides me with reliable high-speed internet that I would never be able to get from a landline here, three miles from the exchange. Nobody will connect fiber internet to the property, so the best we could get on ADSL was 2.5Mbit per second. These days I can expect 50 times that. It's a godsend, particularly when uploading large files to clients.
Segueing from technological blessings to technological hindrances, I have been having real difficulties with my speech recognition software, as the involuntary coughs and sneezes of the past few days have had confused Dragon NaturallySpeaking more than I think they should have. Whenever I cough, it pauses to consider whether it should reject the input (yes, it should) or squirt the text into Notepad. I have been coughing a lot, and as a result I got very little done yesterday. Thankfully my nose has stopped running, so I am no longer going through a box of tissues every few hours.
The situation has been exacerbated by the nature of the text, which is presentation materials for a committee at a large company working on remuneration for directors and other board-level individuals. It is interesting to see how they approach the matter of benchmarking themselves against global rivals, but rather than long, flowing paragraphs the text is fragmented and there is not a great deal of context, and no TM to provide clues about style.
I am tired. It's going to be a long weekend.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
Nearly 5,000 characters done yesterday, and 6,000 needed today. It is nearly 8 AM as I type this, and I am about to begin work.
I'm hoping for a better start to the day than what I experienced yesterday. In order to overcome some of the problems with my voice recognition software that had been caused by my coughing and sneezing, I was experimenting with using my SpeechWare table microphone in different positions on my desktop. Suddenly, the mic button went red, instead of the more u... See more Nearly 5,000 characters done yesterday, and 6,000 needed today. It is nearly 8 AM as I type this, and I am about to begin work.
I'm hoping for a better start to the day than what I experienced yesterday. In order to overcome some of the problems with my voice recognition software that had been caused by my coughing and sneezing, I was experimenting with using my SpeechWare table microphone in different positions on my desktop. Suddenly, the mic button went red, instead of the more usual green. When it's red it doesn't work. If I pressed the button below the light it did go green, but only if I held it down. I tried using different USB cables, and even tried using it on a different PC, but nothing worked.
This was something of a disaster, because I couldn't stand there with my finger on the button all day. I could probably type for a few hours without too many problems, but beyond that my RSI would have prevented me from hitting deadlines.
So, panicking slightly, I hauled out my box of old equipment and tried the Sennheiser SC-30 as a replacement microphone. I used that for a couple of years, many years ago, but in my current system it seems to perform very badly. It was effectively unusable. I also have a Sennheiser DW Pro 2, but that requires charging and it was precisely because the battery would run out at inconvenient times that I stopped using it.
Finally (and I'm sure other SpeechWare users will know how this ends) I gave the mic another careful inspection and checked all the connections. It was at that point that I discovered a switch on the underside of the microphone base labelled "always on" and "press to talk". It was set to "press to talk". I slid it to "always on" and the problem was resolved after a frustrating and worrying 45 minutes. I think that is a piece of poor design on the part of SpeechWare, and that the switch should be recessed into the base so that it cannot be triggered by accident.
However, it also got me thinking about whether I should have a backup microphone of some kind. The SC-30 is apparently useless with Dragon, and a microphone that requires charging before use is equally pointless: it may be several hours before it would become usable.
Perhaps at the end of the month I should invest in another SpeechWare mic, maybe the KeyboardMike. That would be a couple of hundred pounds that I don't want to spend, but not hitting a deadline on a time-sensitive job due to malfunctioning equipment could be much more expensive. Ultimately it's my responsibility to ensure that my tools work properly and to have redundancy in them so that I can complete the tasks I have accepted.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | A guide to counting sheep (and moths) | Feb 12 |
It is noticeably colder this morning under a starry sky, and in the dark I am thinking about the light. During the autumn and winter I use a headlamp to light my path through the woodland, and although the LED in my Skilhunt H150 is no substitute for the giant ball of blazing gas around which the Earth orbits, it is illuminating in a different way.
When we kept a few sheep as an adjunct to the cows on our smallholding and then our dairy farm, my father would check them at night to s... See more It is noticeably colder this morning under a starry sky, and in the dark I am thinking about the light. During the autumn and winter I use a headlamp to light my path through the woodland, and although the LED in my Skilhunt H150 is no substitute for the giant ball of blazing gas around which the Earth orbits, it is illuminating in a different way.
When we kept a few sheep as an adjunct to the cows on our smallholding and then our dairy farm, my father would check them at night to see if any had wandered off to lamb. Sheep (and cows) like to find a quiet place away from the others to give birth to their young. The cows, if we caught them in time, we would often bring into the beudy or shippon, but you can't put a halter on an individual sheep and lead it into shelter.
What you can do is bring in an entire flock of pregnant ewes indoors so that they can lamb in safety, and over in the fields at Llantood, near Cardigan, the first lambs are now out in the fields. These lambs would have been born under shelter, and when we see these as we drive by we know that spring is on the brink of arriving.
Not everybody does it this way. My neighbour is a hale gentleman in his 70s, whose family has farmed their holding for many generations. It was his grandfather who stopped bringing the sheep indoors for any reason, and since then their flock of several thousand head has been outside all year round. The idea was simple enough: Darwinian selection would ensure that weaker livestock were weeded out of the flock. It seems to be working fine.
Anyway, with only a couple of dozen sheep my father did not have that many to count, but conversely each one was relatively valuable, and some even had names. (All our 30 or so cows had names, and would come when called into the cowshed, but cows have more personality than sheep.) So my father would go out with a big blue plastic torch, made by Pifco, and powered by two big PP6 batteries, and shine it round the field. Sheep have a tapetum, so their eyes reflect light. My father would count the pairs of eyes shining back at him, and if there was one short he would go looking for the one that was missing.
For this reason I was aware of the existence of reflective eyes from quite a young age, as I would often go out with him to check the sheep last thing before going to bed. What I was surprised to discover on my morning walks, before the weather got too cold for insect life, was that some moths and lacewings also have a tapetum.
Now, a head torch gives you an interesting perspective in any case because it reveals a flurry of particles in the air. On a damp day these are probably tiny particles of water, but you see something similar even in dry weather, which I'm guessing (it being a woodland) is a mixture of pollen and dust. It looks very similar to footage seen on television of the deep sea - darkness full of suspended particles being blown hither and thither by invisible currents.
Instead of the phosphorescent lifeforms in the deep sea, the woodland offers insect life whose wings and trailing antenna flash whitely in the torchlight. Some of these beat their wings so quickly but move so little that they seem to almost hover in front of me, their eyes showing as two tiny golden specks. These are the ones that remind me of firefly squid or plankton, drifting in a light not of their world.
Back in the more tangible world of work, today is a national holiday in Japan, taken in lieu of National Foundation Day, which fell on Sunday this year. Nevertheless, some busy clients are working through it. One of them offers me a job of about 4,000 characters that is basically in addition to a different job that I am working on (same end client).
The deadline is tight and the offer is made at midnight GMT. By 3 AM the PM withdraws the offer. This is one of those situations in which my time zone is a disadvantage, but in any case I would not have been able to do anything today as I have 6,000 characters to do for a different client. I thank the PM and ask him to keep sending me the offers, as I do work with him quite frequently.
Another busy day ahead. Thankfully my head cold seems to have passed, and my back is feeling noticeably better this morning.
The first daffodil is flowering next to the garden shed. A different kind of busyness.
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Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER | Through the worst of it | Feb 12 |
All done. Several consecutive days at over 6,000 characters a day. That should have been the peak. Still, I have three projects scheduled to be handed off to me tomorrow, and another on Tuesday. There's still time for a sting in the tail.
Here's a slightly confused picture of the RNLI practising their lifeboat drill at Poppit Sands over the weekend. The odd-sha... See more All done. Several consecutive days at over 6,000 characters a day. That should have been the peak. Still, I have three projects scheduled to be handed off to me tomorrow, and another on Tuesday. There's still time for a sting in the tail.
Here's a slightly confused picture of the RNLI practising their lifeboat drill at Poppit Sands over the weekend. The odd-shaped tractor is built to their spec, and goes into fairly deep water to launch the lifeboat off its cradle.
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| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
A quiet morning so far. One client has contacted me to delay a project that should have come in today, but she thinks it should arrive tomorrow. Another has handed off the project as scheduled, which is about 1500 characters instead of 2000 characters. No big deal. She includes a comment on that particular term that the end client wants to be translated a certain way. I have already downloaded the Phrase file for use in the desktop editor, so I pop into that and add the term to the termbase. Goo... See more A quiet morning so far. One client has contacted me to delay a project that should have come in today, but she thinks it should arrive tomorrow. Another has handed off the project as scheduled, which is about 1500 characters instead of 2000 characters. No big deal. She includes a comment on that particular term that the end client wants to be translated a certain way. I have already downloaded the Phrase file for use in the desktop editor, so I pop into that and add the term to the termbase. Good to go.
I'm expecting another project of about 3000 characters from a different client again, but that is not scheduled to be handed off until late this evening Japan time.
Dan ▲ Collapse
| | | | Dan Lucas
United Kingdom
Local time: 19:35
Member (2014)
Japanese to English
TOPIC STARTER
I almost forgot that today is pancake day, or more properly Shrove Tuesday, which in our house means pancakes, done very thin, with each being slid straight out of the frying pan onto a warmed plate, given a scattering of sugar and lemon, then rolled up and wolfed down immediately.
For some reason they are never quite as good as the ones my mother used to make for ... See more I almost forgot that today is pancake day, or more properly Shrove Tuesday, which in our house means pancakes, done very thin, with each being slid straight out of the frying pan onto a warmed plate, given a scattering of sugar and lemon, then rolled up and wolfed down immediately.
For some reason they are never quite as good as the ones my mother used to make for me and my sisters when I was a small child, but strangely enough this does not discourage me.
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