Work is good. Aside from learning what a frikkin hard job translation is, I am also learning lots of other interesting tidbits which I hope will be valuable some day.
My "main" project, while I get worked into some of the other ongoing projects they have, is translating one of their publications into English. I thought the biggest problem would be my lack of any english grammarization ability what-so-ever. The next big time sucker would be making sure I have all the specialized terminology correct. Since Japanese uses those handy characters, it is usually not so difficult to understand the meaning of a new word, but if it is a word that has a specific term in English, I have to search the web to find what that specific English word might be instead of just describing it in my own words. -how the heck did people do translation work before the web????
Anyway, that is what I thought would be the biggest hurdles to getting this job done. Boy was I wrong. The biggest problem for me is getting my mind out of "Japanese think" and into "English think". While I finished a rough translation of the 60 pages a week ago, still sounds incredibly... not English. And when I try to rephrase it in a way that I would have phrased it if I had been writing it from scratch, I CAN'T GET THE FRIGGIN JAPANESE OUT OF MY MIND.
I'm a little worried about the schedule now, as I have also joined some other projects. Most of it is on an almost-observer basis, such as the conference last week where I spent two extremely interesting days listening. My only real responsibility was to make sure a small group of foreign guests made it back to their hotel from the restaurant -luckily one of them remembered the way.
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In other news, I have been spending my "web-play" time on Flickr recently, looking at other people's photos and entering contests and what not. I noticed today that my very first victory, which got me into the "100 Best" photos on Flickr (obviously it's not really the best 100 photos) is being challenged. It looks like I am going to loose. Dang. Oh-well, At least I still have a photo in "the safe" of the ruthless DeleteMe! group.
I had been spending waaaaaayyyy too much time on Flickr until this weekend. Mostly because entering my photos into the groups and pools where they will be seen takes f-o-r-e-v-e-r withe the flicker web site, so I delved into the world of programming once again after a long break. It was strangely exciting, in a geeky sort of way, and in the end I had a nifty little app that displays my photos, what group they are in, what group they could be in, and allows me to add each photo to multiple groups with one click. This is years faster than looking at each photo to remember what group I added it to (I only add one photo per day to any given pool), and decades faster than using the flickr web-site to add photos to one group at a time.
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Finally, a plea to any windows users out there. I need a great RSS reader for Windows. I am prepared to pay (or ask the boss to pay) because my work computer is Windows. The two main features I want are:
1. Displays Japanese. One of the best Open Source ones I found thrilled me until I couldn't see my Japanese feeds
2. Allows me to view all the feeds in a folder in order of freshness of the post, instead of one-feed-at-a-time. One of the for-pay ones (I forgot which one) looked great, but when I highlight the entire folder containing all my "sustainability" or "photo" or "friends" (not so many) feeds, it comes up blank.
I had the same problem finding a good one for mac until I came across Shrook, which I have been using for a year now and is exactly what I am looking for in a Windows version.
