Translating Early Modern French

I have spent over 35 hours in the past couple months translating two articles from French to English. One was in contemporary French about a medieval subject; the other was in early modern French (16thC, I think) and was on the subject of medicine and astrology. I'd read Rabelais in my undergrad many moons ago (pun here = the astrology text was about the moon) in the original early modern spelling, but at least it was a modern type with all of the elipsed characters inserted back in. This was a microfilm or EEBO-like printout of the original. Not an easy thing to read! If I never have to do another translation again in my life, I'll be very happy. These two texts were on top of the traduction d'enfer that I'd done earlier this term. It feels like my entire semester has been spent doing nothing but translating! (Well, that, and admin, job apps, and the web work for which I'm really paid.) Mamas, don't let your babies grow up to be translators. It's a long and thankless job. I've been told that professional translators get paid by the word. Some misspelled early modern words can take me an hour to figure out! Fortunately I was getting paid for this by the hour, but I'd hate to do it every day for a living by the word. I'm soooooo happy to be done though! And now that the semester is almost entirely over, I'm looking forward to getting some "real" work done on my "real" research. Real work! Yay!