I read an interesting post about the launch of Delicious 2.0. When Yahoo! bought del.icio.us, they immediately rewrote the entire site in a new language (two, actually). The rewrite took three years, didn't add significant functionality, broke some old functionality, and introduced a bunch of new bugs — even after three years.
As Delicious stagnated, an [...]
As a freelance independent translator, I often have a hard time saying no to my clients. This is a pretty common problem with translators.
There are a lot of reasons why translators have trouble saying no to clients. One is that translators are generally on the introverted side. You kind of have to be introverted if [...]
I recently developed a Web-based translation memory (TM) application in Python. One thing the application does is fuzzy glossary matching: given a source sentence, it'll find all terms in the glossary that are fuzzy substrings of that sentence (using my fuzzy substring matching module, which is based on the Levenshtein distance algorithm), and return the [...]
I lot of translation agencies make unrealistic promises when it comes to translation memory. Here's one:
Cost savings
You will never again pay for previously translated sentences – irrespective of how many times these sentences reappear in different documents we translate for you.
To a customer, that probably sounds great. But let's think about this for a minute. [...]
I recently created a server application to share Felix memories/glossaries over a local network. After a simple test application, I was confident that CherryPy would serve my needs, so I bought CherryPy Essentials (Sylvain Hellgegouarch) and started hacking.
The story of a website
The book uses a practical-minded, show-me-the-code style that I personally like. The book tells [...]
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 how [...]
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