With one or two exceptions, I rarely used paper in graduate school classes. Only for the heavily math-based Managerial Econ class and for my translation classes did I ever really need to use the printer or a spiral notebook with real tree pulp. The university’s print accounts kindly told me how much of a tree in percent I sacrificed every time I printed something out and kept a running total over the two-year degree program.
The localization and business sides of the program both focused on how much of the process you can automate. Automation meant nearly everything was done on students’ personal laptops, in shared Google docs, or via cloud document sharing systems like Dropbox. No hauling out pocket calendars when there are programs like Google Calendar, Doodle polls, or Survey Monkey.
I shudder to think what such a tracker would tell me about the infinite volumes of paper printed over two years at a given translation agency or even by a freelance translator over two years. From source files of massive reports, target files for each stage of the editing process, sticky notes of all sizes (I especially go through those little tabs), lists, manuals of standard procedures (which I do use in their pulpy format just as often as I look it up on the server database), …
I’m sure there are some print jobs we can do without, but proofreading on a computer just isn’t as good for catching the small stuff that translators need to sweat every day. I’m picturing the perfect gadget for this. It has no backlight like a Kindle, is about the size of DIN A3 paper, can have side-by-side scrolling, has a functional stylus that allows you to edit the page on either side of the screen in a sort of track-changes format that you can commit or decide you didn’t really want, and can be seamlessly imported back into my TM workflow. Also, it would need to have some sort of horizontal sliding bar affixed to the top to keep me from leaning my arm or hand on the surface of the tablet. Yep, that sounds good. I’d still have to print the source file to really see how it’s formatted and to be able to really read it, but that would save so much paper for editing. That’s the next big idea that someone should try out. Ready, set, go.