Always somebody's got to gum up the works...

[dchenes]

This week's final translation itself is easy. It's a couple of calligrams by Guillaume Apollinaire. The hard part of this one is getting the format right, since one of them is going in vertical diagonals down the page and the other is an oval. I got the oval one laid out last night, but trying to convince Word to do vertical text on one part of one page is being a pain. It seems to want the whole document vertical, or nothing. Not to mention the fact that the lines are too long to fit on one page neatly. I tried Photoshop, but it doesn't seem to know enough about text to let me do what I want. It's also partly my fault, because I don't know enough about Photoshop to know what to tell it. There's got to be a way to get a custom-shape text box, though. I wish KSU knew about desktop publishing software, but since they'd have to pay for installing it in the lab, they don't have any. The only reason we've got Trados is because the company gave it to us.

This week's draft translation is a couple of pages of a mystery novel, involving a police briefing. I think I'm either getting better at literary translation, or I've read too many mystery novels, because I only came up with one major "what the hell do I do with this?" sentence, and fewer than usual places where the word I've got isn't the one I want.

I really wish I could get the things I'm supposed to be translating as double-spaced documents so I have room to write things on them. I'm rapidly approaching the point where I want to own a scanner. Unfortunately, that goes on the "when I can afford it" list, which means "not until I have a job again". It's looking like that means "a year and a half from now, if then". Oh, right, it's March, so sometime this month I'll hopefully find out about the assistantship application.

Whoever's outside messing around with the chainsaw has been at it for three hours now. I don't know that it really is a chainsaw, but it certainly sounds like one.

Comments

[marmota.livejournal.com]

If you can't manage to get Word text boxing to do the right thing, try the WordArt tool... it's a button on the drawing toolbar in 2000 and later, and a separate tool in earlier versions.

[dchenes.livejournal.com]

Tried that. It doesn't do quite what I want either. I think I'm going to have to suck up and deal, though.