http://blogamundo.net/dev poking holes in the language barrier since approximately 1 month from now Thu, 15 May 2008 23:52:04 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en An ickle rant ensues. The public doesn’t understand how machine translation works. And generally speaking, the public doesn’t understand that machine translation couldn’t exist without human translators in the loop. In other words, it’s not really “machines” that are “doing” the translating, it’s people. The machines are simply programmed to imitate ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/05/15/machine-translation-is-a-misnomer/ Dear interwebs series of tubes people: Random thought: If you have two translations, and you perform some sort of compression on the both of them, could interesting relationships between the content of the two translations be uncovered? For instance, it seems like you might be able to get rid of non-content ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/05/13/aligning-translations-with-text-compression/ The Google Blog has a chart showing that there is a very clear trend toward Unicode adoption. Apparently their numbers refer to UTF-8 alone (as opposed to UTF-16/UCS-2 or (haha)UTF-32/UCS-4), which again is good news. (Though one wonders if there is any uptake of UTF-16 on the web… I hope ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/05/05/unicode-headed-toward-world-domination%e2%84%a2/ I’m a big fan of Pharyngula, but… he was kinna wrong about a nitpicky little detail. And this particular nitpicky little detail was about language, so, the truth must out! In his post As big as dinner plates?, Dr. Myers compares two articles about the recent dissection of a Colossal squid. ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/05/01/of-the-media-scientists-word-lengths-and-colossal-squids/ I’m a Unicode geek, but I feel like I don’t really know enough about what goes on in operating systems after the encoding and decoding issues are worked out. That is, when and where does all of that glyph selection and font shaping and other black magic actually happen? How ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/04/26/worth-a-look-an-introduction-to-opentype/ Random translation observation: I was translating some Brazilian Portuguese into English, and the source article was about an earthquake near São Paulo. (See? Brazil does have natural disasters!) A particular phrase got me thinking: a zona leste de São Paulo meaning something like “the Eastern Zone of São Paulo.” That’s a ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/04/24/upper-west-side-zona-sul-and-other-tricky-subdivisions/ $ cat unicode.rb # -*- coding: utf-8 -*- s = “ABCあいう” puts “s: #{s}” puts “s[0]: #{s[0]}” puts “s[3,1]: #{s[3,1]}” puts “s.length: #{s.length}” puts “s.reverse: #{s.reverse}” puts “s.encoding: #{s.encoding}” $ ruby1.8 unicode.rb s: ABCあいう s[0]: 65 s[3,1]: s.length: 12 s.reverse: ��㄁め�CBA unicode.rb:10: undefined method `encoding’ for “ABC\343\201\202\343\201\204\343\201\206″:String (NoMethodError) $ ruby1.9 unicode.rb s: ABCあいう s[0]: A s[3,1]: あ s.length: 6 s.reverse: ういあCBA s.encoding: UTF-8 $ # yay! Big ups to Matz. http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/03/31/unicode-support-in-ruby19-yippee/ And now, a wee rant. Check out this page: CityCarClub.info Now, tell me where exactly in the world this carsharing business exists. This is the front page of the company! I was linked to this site by a friend in Helsinki (in the context of another conversation, about carsharing, as it happens). But ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/02/29/welcome-to-nowhere/ Information Week blogger Serdar Yegulalp has some thoughts on the intersection of machine translation and open source: Talk To Me, Openly - Open Source Blog - InformationWeek He’s got an interesting anecdote about how he tackled studying Japanese, and it serves as an interesting intro to the idea behind bitext and ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/02/27/machine-translation-and-open-source/ Update: Okay, duh: I shouldn’t have called it “Bash”. What I meant was, “whatever the sort utility is in my default terminal.” Which, as Bryan points out in a comment below, has nothing to do with Bash: it’s GNU Sort. More updates below. I have a little text file with “Hello ... http://blogamundo.net/dev/2008/02/16/dont-sort-stuff-in-unicode-with-bash/