Good weekend to you, fellow wordsmiths. Won't you take a moment to join me in looking both ways before crossing the weekend road to next week?
It's been fairly quiet around these parts; illnesses fading, Small Proofreaders playing quietly together with their klocki. All in all, a rare blessing indeed. The one thing of related interest that did come up was a rather depressing negotiation with a client about a very large, very ongoing job which we're ploughing through as we speak and will probably keep us busy until autumn.
Despite this being our third year together working for this end client, it turns out now that my mostly monolingual-but-bilingual-where-necessary proofreading on this project is being monolingually proofread again by the agency, then passed to the client for final approval before being deemed as payable.
Now, all of this is understandable - to an extent. You expect the agent to look over your work again themselves, it's common sense. But they're actually going over it in a very laborious way, which includes comparing the lengths of paragraphs between ST and TT and then emailing to ask if we missed a bit or added a bit. In that terribly polite, passive-aggressive way the English are World Champions at.
Again, I'm always happy to deal with feedback and critique, especially if it will produce a better end result. I've always said pride and ego should have no place in the active work of this job. Of course, being proud of a job well done is something else.
But what really gets my goat is that all of this post-return palava is resulting in 60 day+ payments! I long ago stopped working for anyone paying on 60 day terms when I realised how expensive it would be to fly around the world shoving exploding puddings through their letterboxes, but now I'm here again, watching the bills mount up while these phlegmatic Brits ponder their texts.
*sigh* Well, it's my fault for not negotiating a better schedule at the outset, and hopefully now it's all sorted, but I can't help wondering how, of so many people further down the chain, no one said 'Gosh, we're taking ages with these things, I wonder how the translators are coping?'
Oh well, c'est la vie. Better things lie just around the corner. Like this, for example:
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