[Freecats-Dev] A modest proposal

[Michael Roberts]

I suggested this before, but (as usual) I managed to reply only to 
Henri, not to the list as a whole, and he was pretty positive about it, 
so here goes.  I would love to spend some time cranking out an initial 
version of whatever tools we like, in Python, but my financial situation 
is quite dire.

I'd like to propose the following.  I do technical translation in 
addition to programming, from German or French primarily, into English 
(I've also been known to do pharmaceutical German, and general Spanish 
and Italian, and business French, and anything else I can get my hands 
on.)  If anybody can subcontract translation to me at 8 cents per word 
(my emergency rate) -- heck, this week I think I'll take 7 cents -- with 
enough work (say, 2-3000 words per day) that I don't sit around in a 
funk wondering how I'm going to feed the kids, well, consider me engaged 
at half-time for translation and maybe a quarter to a third for 
programming.  I'm pretty good at both, you know.

Anyway, this is a win-win situation.  I'm pretty good at translation, 
and I'm really good at programming.  Nobody's losing money by sending me 
translation work, and yet it's equivalent to funding programming for the 
project.  It sure would be convenient for me.

My translation resume is online on my site at 
http://www.vivtek.com/xlation_resume.html -- I'll be grateful for any 
leads anybody may have.  The tech resume is at 
http://www.vivtek.com/michael_resume.html .  I've got a pretty good 
sketch of an initial set of FreeCAT tools, so it wouldn't be too much 
trouble to get it all off the ground, if I only could get my stress 
level down far enough.

Michael