Archives for the 'web' Category

More SWET posting &c.

In the “web” category:

A few quick links to things I wrote on that other site:

One, two, three . . . (on Ryan Ginstrom’s online and downloadable word-and-character-counting utilities)

Facebook gets translated, saves a ton of money (on, well, Facebook and the translation of its interface)

Guerrilla editing on the road (on the wild adventures of the members of the Typo Eradication Advancement League)

In the “life” category:

Sakura is an active, active girl. She gets us up anywhere from 4:00 to 6:00 in the morning, and when she is up it’s definitely time for us all to be awake, feeding her and playing with her and reading her books. She loves to spend time outside, which will be a challenge to deal with once the summer heat hits in earnest. Putting shoes on is the sign that it’s time to visit the great outdoors, and shoes are therefore among her favorite things these days.

In the “work” category:

Japan Echo lost in the bidding for a Cabinet Office publication that would have meant an extra 50 pages or so of translation and layout each month. Mixed feelings here: the job would have helped the company’s bottom line, but it would have been a brutal pace at which to write and edit, and bureaucrats in the central government aren’t known for their appreciation of finely crafted phrases. We would have had to take on more help for the project and we wouldn’t have enjoyed much of it. So . . . whew?

In place of that it looks like we’ll be busy in July, at least, doing on-site work at the G8 Hokkaido Toyako Summit. Eight years ago I went to Miyazaki and Okinawa for the G8 foreign ministers’ and leaders’ meetings. Sat in tiny, insufficiently air-conditioned rooms and translated or proofed little blurbs of text to go out on the media info system. The work should be the same this time around, more or less, but a full eight-year cycle in the G8 process brings with it a whole lot of technological advances in the meantime, so I don’t think my dim memories of how to key the press releases in that old system will help much with whatever Hakuhodo sets up this time around. Prep meetings begin next week. We’ll see.

05/28/2008 | life, web, work | No Comments

SWET posting

A short post to link to a couple of posts I did over at the SWET blog: Learn the language, stay a while longer, on the possibility that Japanese language ability will let you get a work visa good for five years instead of three, and The translation problem solved again, which talks about the automated handheld translation system of the week. Read, enjoy, etc. etc.

05/08/2008 | translation, web | No Comments

New video site

An old photo site, actually. A little while ago Flickr began accepting video uploads (no more than 150MB and 90 seconds). I just tried it out for the first time and this is the result:

05/02/2008 | family, web | Comments Off

Blogging elsewhere

I just posted over at the swet.jp blog, which is where all the cool kids hang out. I was happy to be invited to write for that site because:

  • It will focus my attention on thinking about the work that I do and writing something readable about it
  • I can then repurpose that content, bringing it back here and further improving it so this place will sparkle and shine
  • It will, um, make me famous and rich, somehow, I’m sure
  • It means that right now, you like me!

So anyway, that’s that. I am about to grab a bite to eat and then hit the sack. This three-day work week is killing me. Hope the four-day weekend will be enough time to recover. Hail Golden Week!

Crap I just finished going through the rigamarole of updating to WP 2.5 and already 2.5.1 is available? Bah. March of progress? Bah.

04/30/2008 | web | Comments Off

WP Success

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.

04/17/2008 | friends, translation, web | Comments Off