Natsume Soseki once taught his students that the correct Japanese translation for “I love you” is “Tsuki ga tottemo aoi naa” (The moon is so blue tonight); what he meant was that to express within the Japanese cultural framework the same emotion expressed in English by “I love you,” one must choose words like “The [...]
Archive for the ‘language’ Category
The death of etymology
An update to this post from a few days ago. The site now looks considerably less amazing: That’s a shame. I hope he has the data from the site and will be able to get up back up onto a new server soon. EDIT: Next day, and the site is online once again, with this [...]
The machines don’t get it all, yet
Here’s an interesting piece on trends in and the future of machine translation: “How do scientists see the immediate future of translation automation?“ The general feeling among researchers is that translators will continue to play a central role in production of the high quality translation well into the future. They will also inevitably contribute to [...]
Chinese characters through time
This Chinese Etymology website looks pretty amazing. Input a single hanzi (kanji input with a Japanese IME work just fine) and the site gives you lists of older variants—the versions of the characters used in seals, old oracle carvings, on and on. Click the image to see what it gives you when you search for [...]
Letting writers hit rewind, play
Here’s an interesting piece from James Somers in The Atlantic. He talks about the discovery of numerous versions of T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” and goes on to discuss some software that lets you go back and review every stage of the process of creating a piece of writing. But why hasn’t this sort [...]
