Worked until 12:30 this morning — starting around 9:00 a.m. yesterday. Untangled 38 pages of endlessly arcane Chinglish, a scholarly paper by a contributor to a journal whose editors have started sending their authors in my direction.
Chinese scholars have to write their dissertations in English, and they’re expected to publish their research results in English-language journals. This practice is so pervasive that entire series of academic journals, published in the US, exist to serve them. Imagine how extraordinary that is: most American graduate students no longer learn a single foreign language, and could no more express themselves in Chinese than they could converse with a Martian. Legions of young American academics can’t read, write, or speak even a Western European language, to say nothing of an Asian one.
So, as an editor I’m spectacularly privileged to be able to help brilliant young scholars publish their research in a language as foreign to them as Klingon is to me, and to help extraordinary young men and women launch careers, at least a few of which will in fact benefit all of humanity. How selfish IS it of me to complain?
But complain and whine I do.
My god, some of this stuff is difficult! What can I say? JPEGs speak louder than words…
It’s impossible to get all this stuff in one intelligible screenshot that converts to WordPress in a visible manner. Click on the image for a better clue of what’s going on there.
Oh…what is it? THAT is a picture of the endless series of edits and comments in the margin of one page from yesterday’s magnum opus.
Is there any question why I can’t get any of my own work done?
Then we have the issue of the insufferably skittish MS Word. Or Wyrd, as I prefer to call it, referring to the Old English antecedent of our weird.
Two things will make a Wyrd file unstable:
a) Asian characters;
b) tables.
This one had both.
Worst of all is when the author has tried to get cute with a table: inserted things like images, graphs, or bulleted lists within the cells. This author came up with bulleted lists, strange and intricate structures, and a variety of font sizes ranging down to Times New Roman 7.5.
That’s right: 7.5 points. We call that sub-microscopic.
A table like this will cause Wyrd to suffer a catastrophic crash. Not just the file you’re working on goes down, but every file that’s up at the time crashes and loses data!
Well, I’m multitasking all the time, and I usually have several files open because a) I don’t want to have to close out and then track the damn things down in the vast innards of a very old, very mature filing system and b) I like to have something lighter to work on for a few minutes when I need to take a break from the truly mind-numbing stuff.
This project took a day and a half to complete. I’ll get paid about $200 for it. Honestly. I could probably earn more working at WalMart and not end up with a headache.
Oh, that’s not fair: yesterday the dogs decided to take a siesta, and that struck me as a pretty good idea, so I crawled into the sack during the heat of the day, too. Slept two or three hours. And had a lovely meal of grilled ribeye, roasted potatoes, gigantic salad that included grilled asparagus, heart of palm, and much else. But still. I made up for all that loafing by working until 12:30 a.m.
Just as I arrived at the bottom of the LAST PAGE, Word crashed.
This, even though I’d cut all the tables out and pasted them into a separate file, which I’d saved and closed.
Word crashed, took down the Chinglish file I was working on, and shut and lost data in EIGHT other active files. Including chapter 3 of the second book of the Fire-Rider series, in which I had almost finished a new scene.
This, even though I had Wyrd set to save every 10 minutes. Even though I hit “Save” manually every time I think of it, which believe me, is often.
Thanks to the way the Mac works, the system brought up eight ghost files, unnamed, one of which contained the lost data for the novel’s chapter. But this meant I had to crash out of eight named files, then take each of the unnamed files, figure out which ones contained rescued data, and save those back down to the directories and subdirectories where the lost files came from.
One of the eight, of course, was not the Chinglish research report.
That thing lost about a third of my edits: hours of work.
So I had to go back in and do all that over again.
Then the other file, the one now holding the graphics, remained to be edited. That’s SIX PAGES of fine-print tables and graphs.
I decided I was NOT gonna go into the elaborately decorated tables and try to format them, because of course this would cause my system to go down again. Let Author wrestle with her own system crashes! Instead, I explained to her what she needed to fix and sent the damn thing back to her.
Well, there’s a silver lining. Two of ’em, actually:
• For the first time in recorded memory, Pup did not pee on the floor. That’s because I carried the laptop out to the back porch and stayed out there all day and into the night, working. So she didn’t pee on the floor her usual half-dozen times because she was never ON the floor.
• And I lost 2/10 of a pound. That was because I didn’t have time to eat dinner.
This morning the back is so spavined I can barely move. So now it’s time to stop this scribbling, lock up the dogs, and go for a two-mile walk to shake loose the superannuated bones.
Mamas, don’t let your babies grow up to be editors!
” most American graduate students no longer learn a single foreign language”
Is this really true? All the PhD programs I applied to had a foreign language requirement that involved a translation of a portion of an academic text in one of several languages that needed to be passed sometime between orals and dissertation defense.
Astonishingly, many universities have eliminated the foreign language requirement.
When I did the Ph.D., I had to pass an exam in two languages. Actually, you could get out of one if you were extremely fluent in a “foreign” language, as I happened to be in French. But even though I tested out of having to take two exams, I had studied German and Italian as an undergraduate and I took Latin in graduate school.
Arizona State has done away with its language requirement for undergraduates and for most graduate programs.
Here’s ASU’s undergraduate language requirement:
“Foreign Language Competency Requirement
“Meet one of the following:
“Two years of the same high school foreign language.
“Attainment of minimum score on a national standardized foreign language test or placement into a third semester college foreign language class based on university placement exam results.
“Two transferable 3- or 4-semester-hour, college-level courses in the same foreign language.”
In other words, you can test out, or you can get out of the requirement by having taken two years of a language in high school. In these parts, trust me, that is NOT a high bar to jump. And…get this:
“You do not need to meet competencies if:
“If you have completed an associate’s or higher level degree from a regionally accredited post-secondary institution with a minimum 2.0 GPA (A=4.0) if you are an Arizona resident. If you are a nonresident, you must have a minimum 2.5 GPA (A=4.0).
“or if you have completed the Arizona General Education Curriculum (AGEC) with a minimum 2.0 GPA (A=4.0) if you are an Arizona resident and 2.5 GPA (A=4.0) if you are a nonresident.”
Hah hah hah hah hah!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The Maricopa Community Colleges graduation requirements are dizzyingly complicated, but it appears that you can get an AA without taking a foreign language by substituting any one of a number of other course options: http://www.cgc.maricopa.edu/Academics/Catalog/Documents/Degree%20Requirements.pdf
You’re not charging enough.
True that. But Q.V. what faculty in China and Singapore earn. Now…graduate students make less than that by the proportion that our grad students earn less than what we make.
Actually, I read these Chinese students’ and junior faculty’s work as a variety of public service. That way, I suspect, lies the future of humanity, since the next hegemony will be coming from those parts.
The Grumblies are correct: you are not charging enough. Your fees should take into account their resources, but you can’t be like the old story of the merchant who complained “I’m losing money on every sale!” Interlocutor asks “Then how do you stay in business?”. Merchant’s reply, “Volume!”
And, how possible would it be to save “your” work to something other than the Mac HD (thumb drive? external HD?) so that it, at least, doesn’t get tangled up in the inevitable Chinglish crashes but is easily accessible when you need a break?
No work would be forthcoming from this source if I charged them even my low rate of $45/hour. You can’t get blood out of the proverbial turnip, and sometimes I need the money, even if the money’s skimpy. Publishing the three upcoming books isn’t free: graphic designers have to be paid, ISBNs cost something, registering the copyrights cost something, the domain names for the books’ and the new imprint’s websites cost something, and so does the guy who does the conversion to .mobi and ePub. I need some cash to pay for these things.
It’s not a matter of where it’s saved. It’s a matter of the fact that the program will go down and lose data that hasn’t been saved within the past ten minutes to three hours. Anything that was saved manually before these rashes is usually up, at least in one of the “Document NN.docx” files. Why it failed to save a third of my edits on the Chinglish paper, I don’t know, since Wyrd was set to autosave frequently.
And it’s not a matter of the source (although the Chinese characters, of which there were only four, don’t help). It’s a matter of Word’s instability in the presence of a table. That’s especially annoying, because a table isn’t what you’d call a very exotic feature.
LOL! Remember, too, that if I were working for Walmart, I wouldn’t be allowed to take time to fix a magnificent meal in the middle of the day, or to knock off for a siesta.