Being a Japanese-to-English translator can be a rewarding career. Due to the relatively small number of native English speakers who learn Japanese well, there's always demand for translators with excellent Japanese comprehension and English writing skills.
Due to this demand, it can pay fairly well. But the thing I like best about being a freelance translator […]
I just released version 1.1.1 of Count Anything.
What is Count Anything?
Count Anything is a word-count utility. It runs under Windows, and supports a variety of file formats, including MS Word, Excel, and PowerPoint, as well as HTML and XML. It provides word and character counts, as well as Asian character counts. I haven't released […]
A common question among new python programmers is, "How do I run my GUI script in Windows without causing a console to appear?"
It's actually quite simple. You can use pythonw.exe instead of python.exe to run it:
pythonw my_script.py
You can also change the extension to .pyw instead of .py:
my_script.pyw
People often want to suppress the console when they're […]
You might get an answer you don't like.
I was recently translating the website of a Japanese company into English. This was one of those semi-convoluted relationships of Company → Web Developer → Translation Agency → Me.
I had a few questions about how to proceed with the translation, which I relayed to the Translation Agency (along […]
Some day, I'll tell young translators about how I used to translate when there was no Google the way crusty old veterans today tell me about writing out translations longhand and hand-carrying them to clients.
Truly, this Interweb thingy has grown indispensable to most working translators, both as a research tool and a way to communicate […]
There's a good article on the igda website on the well known, but often ignored fact that long work hours don't improve productivity.
Like many other things, I find that this applies equally to programming and translation. Due to the nature of my work as a translator, I often work odd hours. Maybe 10 to 12 […]
I recently re-read a great post by Alex Martelli on comp.lang.python about OOD in Python. Read the whole thing, it's brilliant.
Alex basically says that most of the encapsulation mantra in languages like C++ and Java is due to (1) remnants of the much derided Waterfall style of software development (BDUF), and (2) deficiencies in the […]
You've got some legacy C++ code to support. The GUI code has almost no unit tests, but it works.
But now you need to change it. Maybe you need to add a new menu item, or change a generic message box into a custom dialog.
For whatever reason, you need to change your GUI code. It works […]
In a word, yes.
Once upon a time, I worked for a certain Tokyo-based translation agency. I'll call them "R2D2."
For several years, I had been doing a huge and quite profitable documentation project for R2D2 each year — first the initial version, then yearly updates. I thought it was a win-win situation; I even freely gave […]
Often you'll have a table of data. You want to print it out as text, but aligned for readability. Here is a simple module to do that. I'll discuss the code below.
First, we have format_num. This basically just adds commas to our numbers (we want it to be pretty, right?).
import locale
locale.setlocale(locale.LC_NUMERIC, "")
def format_num(num):
"""Format […]
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