This day was particularly easy to write not because of how memorable or nice it was spending most of the day being fed by the Africans who were, quite unexpectedly, staying in the same hotel as me, but because of the sheer volume of work I did.

Hainan is having an outbreak of Covid right now. Presumed—on the basis of it having first been detected among people with ties to the fishing ports—to have come from members of the fishing fleet doing something they weren't supposed to be doing with people from Vietnam¹ (which could be anything from smuggling to attending a cousin's wedding), it's one of the Omicron variants that makes the other Omicron variants look like Alpha in terms of infectiousness.

I didn't manage to break my single day record on words translated because that record was achieved when I was in quarantine in March 2020 and really really really really really bored. I did, however, break my "most words from a single client in a single day" record.

10,481 characters.

Even if me and the client both acknowledge that my output was full of the sort of minor errors and typos that creep in when there's no time for review, and even if lots of it was doable because I've previously translated so many of these sorts of Government Notices that large chunks were already in my personal Translation Memory²,  it's still bloody impressive.

Most of the island's cities and counties have some sort of temporary static management³ measures. There are roughly 150,000 stranded tourists. Flights are cancelled. The airports are closed. The ferry isn't running. And the numbers of infected keep going up....

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¹ Every couple of years I get asked about my ability to either find a Vietnamese translator who is willing to live and work in Lin'gao or about my ability to find a Vietnamese teacher for the Lin'gao police.

² Basically, I've got absurdly expensive software on my computer trained to break blocks of text up into units from one punctuation mark to the next. It is then set to identify each unit down to 65% match with previously translated units complete with highlighting or crossing out the words that have been changed. 

³ Also known as a lockdown