(For posts that are more on the design and/or web side of things, please head over to my other blog.)

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

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

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
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The term for “bullying”

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 … Continue reading
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How does an index work in a Chinese book?

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. … Continue reading
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Agency expectations of “DTP” jobs

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

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 … Continue reading
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Do TV trivia game shows really help people know more?

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

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

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 … Continue reading
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Do CAT tools negatively impact translation quality?

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 … Continue reading
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