I've grown rather tired of work lately.
See, the government in Taiwan requires companies to submit corporate social responsibility reports every year. Basically, the government wants to know how these corporations have been helping Taiwan's society and environment. Usually it's all just a bunch of trumped-up accomplishments, but hey, the government requires these reports, so companies churn them out annually, generally publishing them right before the mandated deadline.
Recently, the government decided these CSR reports also need to be published in English. I suppose it's so that people from other countries can also know about the awesomeness of our big companies. Naturally, these big companies still scheduled everything based on their previous timetables for Chinese-only CSR reports. It's only with the deadline looming that everyone thought to themselves, "Hey wait, we need an English version too!"
Cue every big company in Taiwan throwing money at translation companies (for example, us) to translate their CSR reports in, like, five minutes.
Money is good. Having lots of work to do is good. But the downside is that we actually have to do this work. It means I've been swamped by CSR reports for the last two weeks, and my brain really doesn't want to accept any more input related to this crap. Every day I come to work, turn on my computer, and then immediately enter semantic satiation. I can barely read two sentences before my brain goes, "Nope, we're not doing any more of this, we will now go on a daydream about your coworker's boobs."
BUT WAIT THERE'S MORE!
Different companies' CSR reports generally look and sound quite similar, especially if they're in the same field. So, for example, CSR reports from two different banks would have similar contents and structures. So, naturally, we'd probably translate them in very similar ways. BUT THEN OUR CLIENTS HAVE THEIR OWN PERSONAL TOUCHES! For example, let's say they're talking about paying their employees. Both of them use the same term in Chinese. But in English, one of them insists on using "remuneration", and the other wants to use "compensation". Where one company might want to use "Chief Accounting Officer", another will use "Accounting Manager". Where one will say "operating status", another will want "state of operations". And if we get any of it wrong, they send it back with an angry email, demanding we make endless series of minor corrections. For a whole bunch of different companies, each with their own preferences.
Usually I'd say I want to use some of my vacation days to take some time off and relax, but past experience has showed me that I won't actually get much relaxing done even when I take days off, which sucks.
