The yndigo blog has an interesting post about "untranslatables" — when a word in one language has no good equivalent translation into another. One of the commenters also pointed out a German word that he believed couldn't be captured in English satisfactorily.
The idea that certain words simply can't be translated into another language seems to […]
I'm a technical Japanese-to-English translator. "Fuzzy" stuff is OK once in a while, but I really prefer technical documents to translate. Technical documents have a precise meaning, so it's possible to translate them in a precise way. As long as I know the subject area, can understand the original, and can write authentically in the […]
Saw a great quote the other day on comp.lang.python, in response to a troll questioning Python's usefulness in the "real" world:
Python is for people who want to program, not REAL WORLD programmers.
By Mensanator in comp.lang.python (Google groups link)
(Python encourages a sense of fun, and people on the comp.lang.python group tend to like to have fun […]
Last week I was taking my son to US Land. Unfortunately, our car's GPS is on the fritz. (My son broke it. He has this thing where he has to fiddle with every piece of electronic equipment he can lay his hands on, without the manual. No idea where he gets that from — must […]
The WSJ blog of all places has an article about how men and women code (and women do it better).
Apparently, "testosterone-fueled" men tend to write cryptic code without comments, while "touchy-feely and considerate" women tend to write lots of helpful comments and are just all-around nice people.
If you're going to make sweeping generalizations about […]
Bernie Bierman has an article in the latest issue of the Translation Journal.
In it he claims, among other things, that translation is becoming a profession for "housewives" (yes, he actually writes this), and that an annual income of $70,000 is practically poverty level in the United States.
Let's look at these claims, starting with the most […]
Paul Graham famously compared programming to painting, claiming that programming in its highest form (i.e. what he calls "hacking") is equivalent to art.
This seems to resonate with a lot of programmers, and not just because it makes us feel better about ourselves to believe that we're really creating art when we code our 83rd login […]
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