The case of the disappearing blog

When I finally got done with my morning goat and chicken chores and rolled into the office for another long translation slog, I found a number of concerned messages from friends and colleagues wondering at the sudden disappearance of Translation Tribulations.

Rumor has it that the champagne flowed freely in many a den of iniquity where bulk market bogsters and Linguistic Sausage Purveyors do their dirty deeds. Many a shot of vodka was downed with a robust cry of Чтоб хуй стоял и деньги были! in honor of Putin's man in Pennsylvania, presumed to have done one better on his work in last November's election, and his punk, the Plump Pygmy of Porto, thought to have eradicated this troublemaker's soapbox so translators can be nailed more securely to Across and the Borgian HAMPsTr progress can continue unhindered as well. 

Alas, the blog is back. What actually happened is this: for more than a month I have been receiving notices that the domain (translationtribulations.com) was about to expire, but every attempt to log in to my so-called Google admin console ended up in a confusing, circular mess of web links telling me that I could not add an admin account for my stupid Google profile. Today I finally figured out that I had two Google accounts, one of which I knew nothing about, which was somehow linked to the blog and used a non-existent e-mail address as its login. Apparently the last time a domain payment was made on this account was three years ago, so I am actually surprised that trouble did not hit sooner. Google is a bloody, confusing mess, and if they have a customer service department to deal with such things (and a dozen other messy little service subscription problems), then I have no idea how to contact the bastards.

In any case, it looks like this agitator will be online for another year at least unless someone figures out where to send the drones for a strike. I hear that the French have been training eagles to deal with such menaces, and I am considering taking up falconry here, so maybe I will be ready for that challenge as well.

Interoperability ad absurdum

I saw this in one of my mailing list digests this afternoon: "pptx.itd.sdlxliff - does not import to DVX2". My first thought was "My God, why should it? Serves you right!" as my mind boggled at the thought of someone taking a PowerPoint file through the venerable SDLX application to some version of Trados Studio and then on to DVX2. Whither next? Why not Wordfast Classic just for fun, with a detour through a few different versions of memoQ and a pass through TagEditor just for laughs. Somewhere in all of this, text presumably needs translation, but with all the myriad MT integrations along the way that will surely happen to the satisfaction of the translation as a utility gurus at TAUS.

Seriously, though, that slightly disturbing process chain evident from the file-extension-too-far is just one example of many of the odd surprises out there in the world of real projects and why even in my most ungenerous moments I won't expect any provider to cover every inconceivable scenario perfectly, only to offer sufficient interface support so that somewhere, somehowever improbably, a suitable tool can be added to the process to get the job done.

What's the most absurd process chain you've experienced? This message from the Déjà Vu list seriously tempts me to see how long and ridiculous a "supply chain" I might be able to simulate with a moderately complex file and still run the translation back through the chain to get an acceptable target file. We could have a contest and call it the Rube Goldberg Memorial Translation Relay. The diagrams alone would be worth a round of beer.