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I had planned to grab a bunch more photos from my camera and upload them to Flickr, but my SD card reader crapped out last night. So I still have only that first batch up. Here’s one of the delightful Pokemon bus that took us from Chitose Airport to the site a few days ago.
Work has been rough for me and my teammate (we’re working in pairs of a native-English-speaking translator and a Japanese checker/E-J translator). We were in the work room until dawn the first night, when there was a lot of information to get into the system in time for it to go live, and until well past dawn the second night, when there was little to do. Then it was decided that the media site admin room didn’t need to be manned 24 hours a day, so all the teams who were looking at similar schedules for the rest of our time here got a reprieve. There’d better be a bonus of some kind in this for us!
The schedules are friendlier now, at any rate. Today my team is in until around 8:00 in the evening. We have most of tomorrow off, so we might take a walk up on the golf courses and ski runs on the hills behind our hotel and see if we can spot a fox or deer or SDF special forces sniper or something. Photos to follow, if I can track down a card reader! This is the freaking International Media Center, so there must be some sort of support office for photographers that can hook me up.
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WP Success (Durf.org (Durf)) by Durf
Finally got this place updated to the latest flavor of WordPress. I was tired of seeing that “you are in danger of being hacked by Ukranian credit-card thieves” note every time I logged in.
More than that, though, I was tired of never being able to log in. This hosting company isn’t the best I could have chosen. Time to look into new digs for durf.org, I think.
Work remains busy. Baby remains adorable. Last night I had a quick drink or three with Jed the brave JAT webperson. He showed me his MacBook Air and the translation software he’s working on: langwidget. (LangWidget? He studiously avoids the shift key on that site so it’s hard to tell.) Looked very slick—it works in a browser and lets translators share their translation units (pairs of words or phrases for source and target languages) with the other folks using the software, using the Internet and data clouds and magic and so on. Not exactly the sort of product I could put to good use in my unpredictable, nonrepetitive work, but for many kinds of translation these tools are indeed helpful and his may one day be a nice, platform-agnostic addition to their number.
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The next time you need to communicate with a tiny person raised in a Japanese-speaking environment, head over to the Goo Labs and take a look at the ?????? (”baby-talk dictionary”). Toss your terms into the search field (you can use a baby term, like wanwan for a dog, or the normal word inu), or use one of the categorized lists listed lower on the page:
- Kana order (lists of terms for each character in the Japanese syllabary, either by baby sound or adult word represented)
- By genre (including such toddler favorites as “animals,” “foods and drinks,” and “song lyrics”)
- By sex of babies that tend to learn the term first (including months of vocabulary usage; boys lag by a half-month or so, with the exception of important words like “ramen”)
- By month of vocab usage
My favorite category is probably ????????, “maniac words.” The imported term in Japanese refers not to the axe-wielding variety but to a hobby or other interest taken to extremes, often in a “really out there” area that not many people pay attention to. Some of the examples in the Goo Labs glossary are ??? (insecticide), ????? (Aflac, the insurance firm with the popular duck), and ????? (Ultraman’s phrase “shuwatch,” to borrow the Wikipedia entry’s spelling). Crazy kids.
(Via ??????????.)
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Some time ago I grabbed this link to write about: Google Translate Asks You to “Suggest a Better Translation.” In a nod to the idea that no, computers aren’t really good at this human language thing, the folks at Google have taken the most business-savvy Web 2.0 step possible: make the users improve your product for you! You don’t have to pay actual translators to vet your output, and as a bonus you can serve ads to the eyeballs of everyone involved in the process.
The news this morning featured plenty of amused commentary on the signs Cubs fans were holding up to cheer on Fukudome Kosuke as he almost hit for the cycle. Asiajin has a nice explanation of what happened here: Google Translate tricked Cubs fans thoughtlessly. It turns out that Google’s toy could have used a bit of that user improvement before someone grabbed the Japanese rendering of “It’s gonna happen” there, which was for some reason ????. Telling your team’s guy “you just got lucky that time” isn’t the greatest thing to do when his bat is just about the only thing standing between you and defeat. Which you suffer anyway. Then again it is the Cubs we’re talking about here.
Update: Commenter Adam Rice has written this post about the Google thing, which, as he notes, promises “perhaps a huge jump forward in improvement over older MT systems . . . but perhaps a huge clusterfuck of unharmonized spammy nonsense.”
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