Weekly log: 20120219 (take 2)

This is the first week since a while that I took up any regular assignments from the other place I volunteer at. With the translation done and an extension for the two review assignments confirmed, the week is now officially over. The translation took much longer than I had wanted, or at least that was how I felt. But when I checked my time log, I found out that only 9 hours were logged. I also did not do a proper word count before I started, and after counting I was shocked to find that the document had almost 2400 words (or almost 2700, depending on how you count). (Our new coordinator divides the source into pieces and doles them out to the team, so I had always assumed the pieces to be short, or at least shorter. This also means that the pieces that I used to do were 5000-word pieces…) While slower than doing the weekly stuff, it is still not really that slow, and maybe I was more careful with these pieces? After all, these go out to national TV, so to speak… Anyway, as the week draws to a close, I resolve to get into the habit of doing proper word counting before each of my volunteer assignments (so that I can at least have a better grip at my so-called “capacity” or “throughput”). I also need to find some way to “go into the flow” more easily (Mike Monday’s ebooks look promising — hope they will help); translation definitely needs “the creative flow” in order to be done. An aside: What exactly is Google Translate anyway? I have always viewed it as a machine, but apparently some people view it as a person, a “third party” so to speak. It doesn’t really concern me that much, since Google Translate gives me complete trash for the kind of texts I deal with, so I have never used it and I never will; but I think treating Google Translate as a person of sorts is very dangerous. We have enough irrational TOS’s and laws already; lawyers, judges and legislators who tell us what we must do but who don’t know what they are talking about are, in my humble opinion, putting our future society in great danger.