The collected excuses of an absent mind

Although I really should. Last Thursday I started working again at the translation office where I spent the last summer as a trainee. My contract lasts until the end of July, with an option for two more weeks in August, so you could call me seasonal help. Since it's the season that causes all the fuss and trouble.

July is the month when Finland closes shop. I'm serious. Everyone wants to have their summer holiday in July. Hence, one third of the in-house translators are on vacation in July. The problem is, the holiday season in most of Central and Western Europe doesn't start until later, in August. So, many other European branch offices (excluding Sweden, for instance) are just now busy trying to get as much work done as possible before everyone goes on holiday. And since we get quite a big proportion of our assignments from other European offices, we're swamped.

So, they called me early last week: "We're a bit short-staffed, could you lend a hand?" And here I am, a salarywoman once more. I get this feeling that I currently do more and get paid less than as a freelancer, but the fixed (or slightly flexible) hours have their perks: no more working 'till the wee hours of dawn or on weekends.

But I'm  loath to wake up at 7 o'clock ayem. Besides, my brain doesn't function properly before 11 o'clock or noon. Luckily, I apparently can do quite a decent job on autopilot ^_^;;;

It's done. I hardened my heart and sacrificed my not-quite-virginal credit card to the altars of online bookstores. To be more precise, I finally, realizing their rapidly approaching out-of-print status, ordered all ten Sandman collections in paperback. And got them for a few euros less than the price of Absolute Sandman vol.1 in Finland - ten books for the price of one, so to speak. I simply didn't want to get into the situation where my only options would be to buy the oversized and overpriced Absolute volumes or to hunt for overpriced out-of-print used copies if I ever wanted to own the whole Sandman series (not counting the later additions like Dream Hunters).

It's a funny feeling you get when you've just spent almost 120 euros in books. *giggles, then jeers with a queer squint* But hey, the price per book came to something like 11.7 euros, when the retail price here is closer to 20. So I actually saved a lot of money while it may look like I splurged.

And my copy of Tales of Pain and Wonder has apparently shipped, but not yet arrived. I'm getting somewhat impatient here.

Speaking of impatience, I almost ran out of the said unvirtue when my SDLX edit kept mysteriously crashing on me yesterday. Since it almost invariably died only when I tried to confirm some specific segments in some specific files, I felt the problem was file-related rather than program-related and contacted the SDL Finland office where I had subcontracted the work (all right, it's the office previously referred to as "office B" or something, but it's really too much bother) and we used the best part of this morning trying to work it out.

It turned out that the problem wasn't file-related, but luckily my counterpart in the SDL office found a solution posted on one freelance translator discussion forum. It was indeed a bug, although easily fixable by fiddling with the settings. The only thing that bugs me is that I should have found it myself... I only tried to look into SDL's own solution database, but since they're revamping the system, the database was unavailable. And did I tell you I just updated the program and the problem occurred only afterwards? And that you can't report the bugs to the SDL technical team unless you have a paid support contract? And, based on the dates of the forum discussion, the bug only appeared after the aforesaid update package was launched? And for the time being at least, it isn't listed as one of the "known issues" of the said release.

For a while I felt like a fisherman watching his boat sink. If the this tabletop suddenly died on me, I could load the translation software on the laptop and carry on working. But if the software starts acting up on me, I'm reduced to twiddling my thumbs until I get it fixed. I'm really, really glad it's over.

I was supposed to start working on this translation. There was a zip folder on the company server supposed to contain the files to be translated. Only, it contained all the files of the manual, all 18, when I was supposed to translate on 5 of them - I wasn't aware of this fact at the time, just thought 'oh my, a lot of files, some of them must be really small or something'. So I start translating from file one. On the second day (Sunday) I begin to smell the fish. The files are not huge, but, well, average-sized, but since there are so many of them, it means a huge lot more work than I had bargained for. Something's not quite right. And since it's Sunday, I can't get a hold of the person in charge of the project so I send her five or six emails during the day, each more panicked than the last.

This morning, it was all solved. The person in charge had accidentally uploaded the wrong zip file onto the server - i.e. the folder with everything instead of the folder with only my files in it. She was very apologetic, I was very apologetic for not realizing it sooner - I put it down on my general inexperience in this line of business. I got more time for completing the assignment, since I had started at the first files, but the files I had supposed to be translating were the last ones, so all the work I had done during the weekend went down the drain.

I'm not really angry at anyone about this - well maybe a bit at myself for not realizing it sooner, but only a bit. The person in charge is a friend of mine from the time I worked on-site, and we think we both learned something from this experience. These things happen, errare humanum est, or something like that.

Back to work, then.

First, you complain there's not enough work to put food on the table, and then whoomp! You're swamped. I'm beginning to deduce this is not an uncommon experience for a freelancer :(

I'm working weekends again and there's another assignment waiting, but luckily it has a more reasonable timetable than the current one: I will actually have more than enough time instead of the usual 'almost enough time' or 'not nearly enough time'. I have yet to encounter 'so little time you're zombified into a true translation machine', but I bet it's coming my way. For a while I thought that '11 000 words in three days' -case was it, but nah. I mean, I actually slept during that weekend, so hardly any real zombification occurred (it's a regular joke of mine that this translation machine runs on coffee and cookies - in the translation company where I worked last summer there was always much distress when we ran out of cookies, and I've never drunk so much coffee as I did while working there; I'm still in withdrawal :p).

And the weather doesn't help much: watching gray and rain and rain and gray from the window behind the PC screen is somewhat demoralizing. But, hey, it's already dark now so I can draw the curtains. Besides, bf is making pizza for dinner - not the ready-made frozen kind, but from scratch. He's actually quite good at it :)