Categories: translation, trials
Date: 19 November 2007 23:07:40
I am not superstitious but I can sometimes understand how other people can become so. For example, my most recent entries on the blog were about my 8th anniversary of self-employment and then one entitled “Schicksalstag” - day of fate. Following these portentous entries, my work went into freefall and I did not receive any for two whole weeks.
I decided that the homegroup could start flexing its prayer muscles - mainly on Jack the Lass's behalf as I was beginning to fear her wedding present was going to diminish from the promised bar of chocolate to a Walnut Whip - without the walnut.
One of the frustrating things about receiving no work is that some people (who are in well-paid, salaried jobs with pension, sick pay, paid holidays and other benefits) hear the words “no work” and make comments such as “oh, you lucky thing. I would love to have two weeks off.” Yes, so would I. Another frustrating aspect of having no work is that you don't actually know you will not have had any work on a given day until that day is over. I don't feel as if I have done anything very significant with my two weeks of enforced “idleness”. The days are spent glued to the computer, refreshing the inbox, composing e-mails to clients which are not exactly begging for work but indicating to them that one is available to consider new assignments should they have any (ANY, but preferably worth more than a bob or two) ready to be dished out. I mentioned in a previous post that I was enjoying catching up on Other Things but even these cannot be tackled without having to make regular trips to the inbox. One day, I did risk going to the garden centre - a whole three hours away from my desk - and phew...sort of...nothing came in while I was away.
The problem is that the timeframes in the translation world are incredibly tight. A job will arrive at the agency and the project manager phones or emails round her list of translators. The first to say s/he can take it on, gets it. I like to see the nature of the beast before accepting the work - one person's “general commercial” job can be another person's highly specialised financial text, for example - so accepting a job by mobile phone when you are not within reach of your desk is rather risky, I find. Once the job has been accepted, the translator is given a deadline based on the number of words in the text - not how difficult or specialised or badly written the source text is. If I were to find a potential job offer in my inbox three hours after it had been originally sent, there would be a 90% chance that it had already been placed with someone else. The project manager wants to leave the office knowing that someone is slaving away and she doesn't have to worry that the client won't receive it in his inbox by the time she said he would.
Another frustrating thing is that if one does skip off down to the garden centre or arrange to meet a friend in town for coffee, there is always that nagging feeling of guilt. For not only is there the potential of missing out on jobs, but that one is spending money when one doesn't know when the next penny is coming in.
I don't know why there was such an absence of work as it usually comes in fairly steadily. This morning, however, I had more offers than I knew what to do with and it looks as if I may be working all hours to fit it all in. (Just to underline the mad deadlines point: an advertising agency wants me to translate their presentation. At the moment, they haven't finished writing it. They *think* it will be ready by Thursday morning. They want it back by Saturday afternoon - and they *think* it will be around 6,000 words - that equates to three solid days' work. Given that I already have a long-standing arrangement for Saturday morning, I will have only two and a half days to do it. I am also sceptical about when they will send it to me as last time, they delivered late - and after I had translated half of it, they told me they'd rewritten it and asked if I could re-translate it. Arghhhh.) I also have a feeling that they will decide on Thursday morning that they don't want it translated after all....by which time I might have turned down other work.
So, there has been an absence of blogging because I had nothing much to blog about. This is an advance warning that there may be another absence of blogging because I may have too much to do to blog. Perhaps a case of being lost with and without translation.