I know, I know… Weeks have passed between posts, yet again. I have to blame it all on work and our move to Ottawa. But it’s really no excuse…
I’ve been swamped with work these days and that in itself is a very good thing. My lovely DVX has been the best investment I’ve made in a long time and has saved me hours and hours of repetitive work. My database is growing and each time I start a new project there’s more for it to draw on and my task becomes easier. All those pesky phrases that you see over and over again are inserted and I can get to the new stuff. I should be a spokesperson for this tool!
But one problem I have had lately is the fact that many of my documents are coming in hard copy. They’re texts you can’t get the originals for – legal documents from various countries that have been signed and stamped by notaries, dating sometimes back to the mid-90s. I have a PDF converter (ScanSoft’s PDF Converter Professional 3.0) and it actually does a marvellous job with the OCR. But when things are blotted out by notary’s stamps, or the original image was scanned in upside down, there is a lot of processing required. In a recent job, I had to take all of the multi-page TIFF images and rotate each page, saving the document each time, so that the pages were right side up. Then I had to print to a PDF. Then I had to open the PDF in Word so it would convert, and do a Save As. (Note that I used to convert to Word inside the PDF Coverter software, but it would do crazy formatting and I found that when you just open a PDF in Word, it converts it using that same tool, but the formatting is fine.) Finally, I had to go through the text and remove all the images of stamps and signatures, especially where they were superimposed over text, decipher the text underneath, type it in, and only then did I finally have a document I could import into DVX and begin translating.
Still, I’ve found that all that work is worth it because everything is then in my translation and terminology database. It is just a bit of annoyance, though, to have the time I’m saving with translation lost in conversion. 
