The GITS Blog

Kusaya (くさや) is a Japanese dish of fermented fish. The taste isn't too bad, but the smell is truly overpowering. A work acquaintance of mine is from an area where kusaya is a delicacy, and wanted me to try some. So when she and her husband visited us in Okinawa, they brought a bottle of [...]

… you acknowledge that you owe me a hamburger by next Tuesday. If that sounds silly, why would this disclaimer in an email signature sound any less so? By receiving this email, you are acknowledging that it contains attachments or other information that is intended solely for the use of the named recipient or recipients.

A couple of days ago, I did a translation of an equipment manual. The client had helpfully supplied a glossary with the English translations of the various parts of the equipment. One of them caught my eye: Erection status monitor I suggested to the client that they change that one to something a bit less, [...]

The other day, a friend passed along some uncomplimentary feedback about my word-counting program for Windows, Count Anything. The fact that some people don't like the program doesn't bother me — there are many word-counting programs out there, some of which are also free. I wrote mine because I had a few specific needs with [...]

I lost a really great potential job today due to a series of misunderstandings. A couple of days ago, another translator gave me a referral to an attorney, who was looking for an IT translator. The attorney sent me several files, and asked for an estimate, CCing his client. The client then emailed me and [...]

I think that one of the great strengths of interpreted languages like Python is the ability to iterate rapidly, due to the lack of a compilation step. I've been reading Richard Feynmann's fascinating reminiscences in Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynmann. The entire text is available online. One passage that really struck me was where he [...]

A recent discussion on the Honyaku mailing list about low rates, and the clients who offer them and the translators who accept them, had me asking myself: should we care how much other translators charge? I generally have no problem with what other translators want to charge, and wouldn't take kindly to other translators trying [...]

If you write Japanese, you'll be familiar with using a front-end-processor (FEP) to input Japanese text. On Windows, this is typically the IME. IME lets you choose between various "input methods": direct input (normal keyboard typing), hiragana (which can be converted to kanji as needed), katakana, and so on. With the exception of direct input, [...]