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If there are two things the French team likes to do outside of working hours, it’s going into Baikonur on Saturday night to party until the wee hours and to go into town at any time to see something new. (I must admit to a weakness for the latter, myself.) Yesterday, events conspired to combine [...] Work during the campaign doesn’t typically follow a humdrum 9-to-5, Monday-through-Friday rhythm, so after a while, it’s easy to lose track of what day of the week it is. This is particularly true as the campaign progresses and the phases of propellant loading and joint operations are undertaken. Today was my first turn as the “morning [...] Yesterday was a pretty long day. The team got to the airport just as the Antonov transport plane was arriving, and the customs formalities went smoothly. I was part of a group that was supposed to go onto the field ahead of the group that was to unload the aircraft, but the authorities let the [...] My stint as the “on call” interpreter was pretty uneventful yesterday, which is as it should be. I received only one call, from the Russian control room, about some technical detail that had to be resolved with the propellant team soonest, and as I had just walked past the team members sitting outside the hotel [...] More sessions, and too many at one time, making it hard to choose which ones to attend. Some offer significant added value in the attendance; some don’t (the corresponding paper on the Conference CD suffices). And some may not be worth going to at all. I ran across an old acquaintance, Paul G., who mentioned that [...] The morning’s program was devoted to the annual meeting of all ATA members, which I decided to skip, as I have nothing valuable to add to the discussion. My day began by walking to the Marriott from my base near the United Nations. Once in the vicinity of the conference hotel, I kept walking, past [...] I took the opportunity to sleep in this morning, and then to wander Manhattan’s streets in zig-zag fashion on my way from 2nd Avenue & 45th to Times Square. Although I grew up in Queens, just across the East River, I left New York more or less permanently a quarter century ago, so in a [...] The American Translators Association returned to New York, the city of its roots, for its 50th Annual Conference. When I registered for the conference two weeks ago, all of the rooms set aside by the Marriott Marquis (just off Times Square and 45th) had been reserved, so after a few more sticker-shock-inducing calls to nearby hotels, [...] My attention was directed a couple of years ago to New York’s Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which had apparently made the decision to forego human translation, deciding instead to offer non-English speaking visitors machine translations of site pages. Presumably this was done as a cost-cutting move, despite the fact that the resulting translations were, by the [...] Every once in a while, I’ll be invited to fill out a questionnaire for a translation agency. Said questionnaire usually asks for all sorts of information, often at an exhaustive level of detail (for example, just in the phone number section, asking for work phone, home phone, cell phone, secondary cell phone, fax number, as [...] |
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