Ambrose Li

The missing index to Chika Miyata’s How to Draw Almost Every Animal

Ambrose — Tue, 29 Oct 2019 02:08:56 +0000

Chika Miyata’s How to Draw Almost Every Animal is a useful reference, but like many books these days, it has no index. It has a table of contents but it’s still hard to find any animal because — let’s be honest — the list is in random order.

So I decided to fix the problem myself by creating an index.

You can download my index to How to Draw Almost Every Animal here. It’s exactly two pages and exactly the same size as the book after trimming, though you’ll have to trim it a little more if you really want to glue it to the back.

I’ve always wondered about “冷” (laang1)

Ambrose — Mon, 25 Dec 2017 22:55:50 +0000

I’ve always wondered about “冷” (laang1). It’s clearly not Chinese, so it’s clearly a loan word, but it’s clearly not English either. I think the word has been borrowed from French. Laang1 is, I think, laine. (I wonder if the … Continue reading →

The term for “bullying”

Ambrose — Sat, 01 Apr 2017 16:25:42 +0000

A while ago I ran into the word “bullying” in a project. The original translator translated it “霸凌”. I hated it, but after some research I found out the translation was actually not wrong.

Less than half an hour ago I suddenly realized the rendering 霸凌 ‘bullying’ is actually in the very fine tradition (which I thought was long lost) that produced terms like 世紀 ‘siècle’, 系列 ‘série’ and 系統 ‘system’/‘système’—a transliteration that actually means what the Chinese characters suggest it means.

That said, the ingenuity of the term would have been more easily seen if “bullying” were actually pronounced /'bʌliʔɪŋ/; unfortunately that’s not how the word is pronounced.

How does an index work in a Chinese book?

Ambrose — Wed, 25 Jan 2017 17:55:54 +0000

You might have wondered: How does an index work in a Chinese book?

Let me illustrate this by showing how looking up a word would work if indexes in English books worked the same way they do in Chinese books. For the purpose of this illustration let’s say lowercase letters are more “standard” because this will be important.

Let’s say you want to look up the word “stroller.” You would start by counting the number of “strokes” that make up the word. Let’s say s is one-stroke, t two, r one, o one, l one, and e one, because that’s how you write these letters. So you flip to the index and look under the heading “9-stroke words,” and you start scanning through the entire section. When you see the word “stroller” you are done.

What if you couldn’t find it? Maybe it’s not in the index. Or maybe your counting skills are not up to par.

No, seriously. Maybe you undercounted because the way you write your letters aren’t so standard. Maybe the letter r is supposed to be written in two strokes instead of one.

So you look under the section that follows and repeat the scanning through the entire list of “10-stroke words.”

Still no luck? Then maybe you overcounted instead. So you repeat the scanning through the entire list of “8-stroke words.”

If you still can’t find it, then you’re pretty sure “stroller” is not in the index. Unless, of course, the word is actually spelt p-r-a-m in the book because the author thought “pram” is a more common form than “stroller” in the British Commonwealth, or maybe the author thought Canadian English is the same as UK English. And the indexer never thought of adding a cross reference for “stroller.”

Actually this is a bad example, because “pram” is actually 9 strokes so you would have found it. Maybe the difference between “streetcar” and “tram,” but you get the idea.

You might say, That’s a stupid way to orgranize an index, but you see, Chinese is completely not alphabetical. In English you can get away with knowing how to arrange 26 letters. In Chinese no one can be expected to know how to arrange more than ten thousand “letters.”

So what do we make of indexes with no headings in a Chinese book? Useless. Unprofessional. A disservice to the reader. And I’ve just shown you why.

Agency expectations of “DTP” jobs

Ambrose — Tue, 09 Aug 2016 01:39:15 +0000

If an agency offers you a “DTP” job (replacing text in a JPEG file) for a total project fee of $15, and there are no instructions from the end client (no style sheet, no branding guidelines), what really is the agency expecting?

If I charge a student’s rate ($30 an hour), $15 would suggest a half hour’s work. Since an invoice for half an hour (many would even say an hour) is pretty much minimum charge, the agency is in effect expecting me to be still a student and to finish the work in less than half an hour (not a full half hour, since invoicing also takes time).

However, just figuring out what typefaces have been used (since the file is JPEG and there are no instructions) already took me a solid half hour. So the agency is pretty much (probably unknowingly) expecting me to not spend any time on the actual layout—or, let’s say, spend only five minutes or less.

Granted, it turned out to be a common face. So obviously, if I were better in recognizing typefaces I would have had much more time to do the layout; I still think this says a lot on why the quality of so much “professional” work is so low…

PS: I wish Adobe hadn’t abandoned MM fonts. Compressed is too narrow and Condensed is still too wide, a project fee of $15 justifies neither, and having to artificially compress Regular to 64% really is unacceptable.

Found the Ramat de la typographie at the @TorontoLibrary, but it’s misshelved…

Ambrose — Sun, 01 Jun 2014 20:02:21 +0000

Yesterday there was a discussion on the CE-L about adapting the APA style to French theses. Somehow, the question of spacing and punctuation came up, and someone made the claim that in French typography, “there are hard spaces within parentheses ( like this )”. I’m not French native or even French fluent, but I did pass my B1 exam and have read my share of French books and magazines, and honestly I couldn’t remember ever seeing hard spaces within parentheses. But I could just be ignorant, right? i So by pure happenstance I also saw an ad on SDGQ’s job board through their LinkedIn discussion group. And it’s interesting—and very pertinent to the discussion on CE-L—was that one of the requirements listed on the ad was:

Connaît et manie Le Ramat de la typographie d’Aurel Ramat et d’Anne-Marie Benoît et The Elements of Typographic Style de Robert Bringhurst

In essence, whoever posted that ad is treating the Ramat as the French equivalent of Bringhurst. It just so happens that the Toronto Reference Library has not one, but two copies of the Ramat. So a couple of hours ago I went downtown to the library and looked for the book. Because there are no catalogues on the fourth floor, I asked the librarian and he looked it up. I went with him to the general French section and we couldn’t find it. So he turned back and I followed, and when he stopped at the shelves labelled “French as a Second Language” I was already feeling a little amused. He looked around, and before long, I spotted the book before he did. I mean—if you don’t get why I was amused—isn’t this incredible? This is an incredibly technical book and it’s shelved on the FSL shelves. FSL people definitely do not want it if even all graphic designers are not expected to know what’s in there. Why, then, has it been shelved on the FSL shelves? It looks like the librarian who filed the book did not even bother to read it to figure out what it’s about. So what does the Ramat say about hard spaces within parentheses? “None” (rien): It doesn’t even say “thin spaces for quality typography, none otherwise” (fine (rien)). There should not be hard spaces within parentheses, just as I thought. And the APA question? I did find something yesterday: An unofficial and partial French adaptation of the APA that says plainly that there is no such thing as an official French version, and something even less official-looking but much more useful because it actually covers subtitles.

Do TV trivia game shows really help people know more?

Ambrose — Mon, 05 Aug 2013 07:32:17 +0000

I still remember one day when I watched Jeopardy! when the host asked what was the event that happened in the upper room recorded in Acts was. A contestant pressed the buzzer and answered “Pentecost.” To which the host replied “No.” “The last supper,” the host added. But of course the contestant was right and the host was wrong. In Acts, the event that happened in the upper room was indeed Pentecost and not the Last Supper. All of United States and Canada who watched that show that evening who did not know better now gained a wrong piece of pseudo-knowledge. Last week a Canadian Spelling Bee contest happened to be on when I walked by the television. One contestant was asked to spell “trummelled.” “T-r-u-m-m-e-l-e-d. Trummeled.” “Incorrect.” She looked confused, looked around, looked at the judges, and the same judgement was pronounced once more: “Incorrect.” So she walked off the stage, still looking very confused. But of course her spelling was correct; it was simply American. So do these game shows really increase the audience’s knowledge? I don’t really think so. They can’t possible increase the audience’s knowledge when even the judges do not even know all the correct answers.

What is the source of captioning errors in professionally done sites?

Ambrose — Wed, 20 Feb 2013 23:05:21 +0000

I got access to lynda.com to watch some tutorials (which turned out to be quite unnecessary) and despite my first impression, I actually ended up finding a serious error before even finishing a fifth of the tutorial—and it was the kind of error that we usually attribute only to machine-generated transcripts. (And incidentally the punctuation and the way the transcript has been broken up into captions are also substandard. No one in my program would accept such captions as accessible even if there were no transcription mistakes.) Since lynda.com is a professional site (or at least that’s the image it’s projecting), this leaves us with a few questions that really beg for an answer. First,

were the captions generated by machine and then post-edited (after all, my first impression was that they were fairly accurate—a human is obviously involved somewhere),
were they transcribed by professional transcriptionists, or
were they crowdsourced (since we can pretty much rule out normal volunteering)?

And, secondly, if the answer is either of the first two, then we are left with more questions as to why such an obvious error has crept in:

Was the pay too low?
Were the deadlines unreasonable?
Were the transcriptionists non-native (something I don’t personally believe in, but a lot of people do)?
Was it some other reason? or
Was it a combination of the above?

I would be tempted to say a combination of the first two, but is there a way to find this out? If an experiment could be designed, would such an experiment be ethical? I wonder.

The beginning of wisdom is to call things by their right name

Ambrose — Sat, 05 Jan 2013 22:36:55 +0000

I spotted this “Chinese proverb” on AIGA’s article Where Design Is Going, And How To Be There, and, naturally, I immediately wanted to find out which proverb it is exactly, in its original Chinese form. I landed on a forum post where one poster claimed the original wording to be “认知是智慧的开始,” which obviously doesn’t even sound right. At the end of the discussion, the conclusion was that the only possible proverb that would fit the sense of the English was “名正言順.” Additional searches seemed to confirm this conclusion, most results equating the English rendition to “名正才能言順.” The source text came from the Analects, where Confucius is recorded as saying,

If names be not correct, language is not in accordance with the truth of things. (Zi Lu, 3)

So the English translation is in fact a very loose translation. While we might arguably say that unsound arguments have no wisdom in it, I believe the English has been intentionally crafted this way to parallel Proverbs 1:7, often rendered “The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.” What was the translator’s original intention? I really don’t know, but possibly the translator might have wanted to say something to the effect of “whereas the Bible was the foundation of Western culture, Confucius was the foundation of Chinese culture.” But in any case, I believe the puzzle of “what proverb is this?” has been solved.

Do CAT tools negatively impact translation quality?

Ambrose — Fri, 28 Dec 2012 19:51:56 +0000

Someone asked, “Are you using a CAT tool?” I do use one, but I don’t really find it useful. I use one only because apparently everyone is using one. The asker was Chinese, so I was going to say that CAT tools favour European languages. But then I realized that German word order can be quite different from say English or French word order too, so that argument might not hold water. But then perhaps the mismatch between our punctuation systems does make CAT tools a worse fit for Chinese than it is for German. I wonder if any research has been done on whether CAT tools are having a negative impact on the quality of translations into non-European languages, and if not, whether any such research should be done. I wonder, if such research should be done, how should an experiment be designed to find out the answer, and what kind of methodology should be used for perform such an experiment. I wonder, if this would count as “inclusive research.”