Hacklog: Blogamundo — poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now

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“A whole separate personality”: Jodie Foster

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year ago.
Tags: .

You speak fluent French. Are you raising your sons to speak it as well?
The littlest one is going to a French school once a week. The older one’s been kind of rebellious about it, and I didn’t want to force him. Maybe as he gets older he’ll be more interested because he knows the little one’s trying to speak it.

Does it come in handy knowing two languages?
Honestly it’s given me the most joy of anything that I’ve done in my life. To be able to speak another language fluently, it’s like having a whole separate personality. And even though I am American, there’s a part of me that can come to France and think I’m a French person.

Total Film - More With Jodie Foster… (Thanks for the tip, Amy.)

And she sings, people!


Vdict.com, and: Your favorite web dictionary?

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year ago.
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The search feed spirits brought me a link to an interview with Nguyễn Công Chính, who created the successful Vdict Vietnamese Dictionary.

I don’t know Vietnamese, but by looking up “dictionary” (in Vdict!) I managed to determine that the Vietnamese translation is từ điển — and clicking that link will confirm that Vdict is #1 in Google.

Like a lot of web projects, this one started because the creator was scratching his own itch:

Inner sanctum: How did Vdict come into being?

My involvement with the dictionary was a product of my own need when I was studying at Curtin University in Perth, Australia.

I ran into some difficulties in my studies; I had a lot to do and I was spending too much time looking up new words. It was especially hard to find translations for technical terms and phrases, and my large dictionary was no help.

In 2004, I lost my huge, heavy dictionary and found myself in need of a replacement. Using what I knew about information technology, I started building my own online dictionary. I hoped eventually it would help me and other foreign students.

There are some poll results about Vdict users here that are a testament to the tool’s success. Congrats, Mr. Chính! ☺

More generally, after using and studying a few bazillion web dictionaries, I’ve become a student of their design and capabilities. I’d be interested in hearing about your favorite web dictionary:

  • Which is your favorite?
  • Is usability or content the most important to you?
  • Do you use any plug-in style tools like rikaichan or meta-tools like the BBC’s Vocab/Geirfa?

This week I’m going to be posting about more web dictionaries. Suggestions welcome!

And so on.I’ve got a pretty big collection of links here: patfm’s bookmarks tagged with “dictionary” on del.icio.us.

Crash Course Spanish Botany

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year ago.
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And now another episode in the saga of me getting to know a Spanish-speaking automated checkout machine.

I can’t really tell you what possesses me to push that “Español” button rather than its equally prominent “English” button on the touch screen.

It’s just so there.

It’s so saying I DARE YOU.

And dagnabbit, I always take the dare.

Except today, there was a half-remembered recipe for Creamy Potato-Leek Soup in my mind (yours truly is a vegetarian), so I had a basket full of… produce.

And I mean full. And after sending through everything with a barcode, I saw to my dismay that half the basket was still full. And the guy behind me just sort of smiled and shook his head.

I think he spoke Spanish.

Clearly, he thought it was more amusing to watch me desperately page through all the tabs on the produce display than to tell me what was what. Hey, I did push the button.

ESPAÑOL

Just like that.

Well, I managed somehow. The killer one, of course, was the leek.

And it wasn’t just that I had no clue how to say “leek” in Spanish, it was that when I finally found a picture by tabbing through *cough* every tab in the produce display, and discovered that a leek is a puerro, the little scanner thingie kept rejecting me.

What, was it actually a shallot in the little picture? Were they going to find out I was a FRAUD??

And that robot lady kept saying

“USTED NECESITA AYUDA?”

Oh, yeah, I needed help alright.

But see, those little twisty thingies that they wrap around the vegetables have a number you can punch in.

I WAS SAVED.

“POR FAVOR, MUEVA SU PUERRO A LA CINTA.”

At least I think that’s what she said. I was so nervous I’ve probably forgotten already.

And thus ends my tale.

(I think I’ll be spending a bit of quality time over at the ever-useful Quizlet.com…)

s/Eurodicautom/IATE/g

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year, 1 month ago.
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Looks like there was a happy ending to the Eurodicautom story: IATE.

Eurodicautom was a huge translation lexicon sponsored by the European Union. Due to some sort of copyright or intellectual property dispute (the details of which I know precisely nothing), the site seemed headed for closure. And since then it has closed (its smoldering hulk rests in disheveled peace at archive.org).

Obviously, the loss of such a resource was not good news for translators. Fortunately, however, this horror film had an agreeable sequel: the recently launched “Inter-Active Terminology for Europe” or “IATE,” which contains everything that was in Eurodicautom and then some.

Unless I’m mistaken (corrections welcome), it looks like IATE handles more languages than Eurodicautom ever did. The bolded languages in this list are new:

  • Bulgarian
  • Czech
  • Danish
  • German
  • Greek
  • English
  • Estonian
  • Finnish
  • French
  • Irish
  • Hungarian
  • Italian
  • Latin
  • Lithuanian
  • Latvian
  • Maltese
  • Dutch
  • Polish
  • Portuguese
  • Romanian
  • Slovakian
  • Slovenian
  • Spanish
  • Swedish

(I’d be interested to know if I’m mistaken in this list.)

It’s a nice simple interface. I do rather wish it were possible to bookmark results.

And an overflow:auto on the CSS for div#bodyFormLayout would be nice. :P

[via the awesome Into Spanish Translation Blog at JB Translations]

-ia -ie… doh! A Tale of a Wayward Wildcards

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year, 1 month ago.
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Here’s a little tale about the dangers of counting words.

Ooh, danger.

We’ve been working on a lexicon tool for Blogamundo, which has wildcard support. So you can do things like search for:

ro/en/Revolu*

…which means “find me all the English translations for Romanian words that start with Revolu. It’s fun to play with, and useful when translating.

But here’s the interesting thing. If you actually run that query on the lexicon we’ve bootstrapped from Wikipedia, you get results like this:

Revoluţia franceză » French Revolution
	
Revoluţia din Februarie » February Revolution
	
Revoluţia engleză » English Civil War
	
Revoluţie » Revolution
	
Revoluţia industrială » Industrial Revolution
	
Revoluţia din Octombrie » October Revolution
	
Revoluţia din Neolitic » Neolithic Revolution

And then a bazillion more revolutions.

So as I sat staring at that pattern of words, as I am wont to do, I thought “Hmm, maybe if we counted up the word frequencies of every word in that whole result list, the actual pair Revolution » {whatever the Romanian word for revolution is} would bubble up to the top.” It seemed at a glance that the translation was obvious: Revoluţia. But if we could use frequency alone to detect that pair automatically, perhaps it would be possible to run the same trick with other search result sets, and thusly improve the lexicon.

So I tested my little theory by simply splitting the result set into words and counting them all up:

    21 Revoluţia
    15 Revolution
    7 of
    7 din
    4 revolution
    4 de
    4 1848
    3 la
    3 Revolutionary
    2 Socialist

As you can see, Revolution and Revoluţia are by far the most common. This strongly suggested, I imagined, that Revolution and Revoluţia were in fact translations.

Except they aren’t.

Not exactly, anyway: as clever people have probably already noticed, I had actually missed the answer, sitting in the results of the initial query, precisely because I had used a wildcard search. There it was, plain as day:

Revolution » Revoluţie

..with an -e! If I had looked up en/ro/Revolution in the first place, it would have been a unique result.

Come to find out, after Wikipediacizing a bit, all this is to do with the fact that Revoluţia is showing up in definite noun phrases. There was only one October Revolution (thankfully), so we have Revoluţia din Octombrie, but when the word for “revolution” stands alone (as it does in the name of the Romanian article on “Revolution”, we get Revoluţie. Not sure on how those details work out, but the distinction is plain enough.

I can attest to the fact that this frequency trick often works for finding translated pairs of words, I’ve done it a lot. But in this case, at least, grammatical variation within the target side of the results leads to the numbers being a bit misleading.

Presentation on “Becoming a Freelance Translator”

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year, 1 month ago.
Tags: .

I came across a pointer to a nice presentation at There’s Something About Translation:

translation as vocation: a slideshow on Flickr

By the folks at http://tra.nslator.jp/, who clearly have a sense of design!

Talk about l10n’in

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year, 1 month ago.
Tags: .

Via the always interesting Found in Translation, a rundown of seven versions of a song recorded by popstress Avril Lavigne: Mandarin, Japanese, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Portuguese.

At least, the chorus is localized, and the verse is in English. It’s just a marketing trick I suppose, but then… pop music is kind of a marketing trick too, heh.

PS. The Spanish is pretty convincing, the Portuguese version is… um… clunky.

But a Brazilian on Youtube said it better:

lol
kkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkkk
huahsauhsuahsuahsuahsuahusahushaushauhsauhsauah

That would be some Brazilian AOLspeak, if you were wondering. ☺

“I know how it feels”

Written by Patrick Hall, 1 year, 1 month ago.
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“I know how it feels not to know the language,” Adame said as he sat at his desk waiting for his mental health class to begin on a recent morning.

“My mom went to the hospital, and because of the language barrier, she couldn’t understand what was going on …

“I’d like to be helpful,” he said.

Se habla español

There are two topics that come up repeatedly if watch searches for the term “translation” on blog and news search engines. One is medical translation.

(The other is manga.)