Search this site
Meta
Weekly log: 20120822
Two things worth mentioning this week: A research survey I filled in a couple of days ago, and what I had been assigned to translate this week. It was a survey that was posted in a forum. Curiously, it was … Continue reading
Weekly log: 20120811
Today, I woke up to two questions from one of my terminology discussion forums. Questions that I certainly should not even contemplate answering due to my plain incompetency in French. However, I tried looking closely at the two questions this … Continue reading
How bad is machine transcription?
We all know machine translation is pretty bad, but what about machine transcription? After trying to seriously transcribe some lectures in an online course I’m nominally taking, I have to say: Pretty bad too. Continue reading
Is the native language requirement doing harm or good?
I remember my Form 6 English teacher (a native English speaker of Irish descent) teaching us that students of the English language are expected to eventually have an intuitive sense of whether something you hear or say is correct or incorrect … Continue reading
What Coursera’s NLP course has taught me
I registered for Coursera’s NLP course in order to (among other reasons) get a little more informed about machine translation, but it turns out that the course — in its current incarnation — does not cover MT at all. So … Continue reading
The apostrophe of plurality — English’s little hidden gem
I find the aversion, among some translators, of using the apostrophe for forming plurals disturbing. Aside from the fact that I actually read this rule from a style book and I actually find it reasonable, it is also my personal feeling that graphic designers are at least partly to blame … Continue reading
The Hunger Games and the sad state of high-profile translation projects
I saw The Hunger Games yesterday. Naturally, after getting back in front of my computer, I went straight to Google. Yes, you read that right — I never read the book. There was a ton of information out there, but one thing … Continue reading
Speed of transcription
Since I had never really timed the speed I do English transcriptions, I did a little experiment today trying to transcribe lecture 5.8 for one of the classes that I’m taking. The result? It was shockingly time-consuming: I spent 5 … Continue reading
The pun
If you are taking Coursera’s SaaS class, you might have been wondering what kind of “pun” I was referring to when I mentioned last fall’s AI class having gotten its “scenarios” right. Well, guess no more, the answer is right … Continue reading
Weekly log: 20120226 (or “The importance of accurate transcripts”)
No translator would dispute the importance of the quality of the source text, but if the source text is itself an audio transcript, then the source text itself would not really be the true source text per se but rather … Continue reading