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New Twist

Posted on 2012-01-28
Oh comment spam! My spam blocker detected and quarantined roughly 80,000 pieces of comment spam over the past 12 months. Before deleting the messages, I usually take a quick look to make sure that no legitimate piece was blocked by mistake....

Music To Translator Ears?

Posted on 2012-01-22
When I read the first couple of sentences in the following quote of a Eurobarometer study conducted by the Gallup Organization about the languages preferred by European Internet users, I was very happy. While 90% of Internet surfers in the EU...

When News Isn’t

Posted on 2012-01-20
In one of those aggregated dailies that are the bane of the Twitterverse I came across the tantalizing headline “German Technical Translation.” Well, I thought, let’s find out about German technical translation. The link took me to a page...

The Inner Child

Posted on 2012-01-06
Click on image In the early 70s, I was working for Collins Publishers in an old and very cold building in Glasgow’s Cathedral Street. Whenever we sat shivering over our documents, we would talk about how much nicer work could be if only...

Continuing Illiteracy Trend

Posted on 2012-01-03
The new figures are out, and they confirm what I wrote last December 13: I’m shocked at the speed with which Web surfers seem to have become Internet-illiterate. It will be interesting to see the numbers at the end of this year. Experian...

Year-End

Posted on 2011-12-21
It is fitting that this should be post #700 of my blog. Even in my fourth year in Southern California I cannot get over how great the weather is. Here we are on the day of the Winter solstice – the skies are blue; the camellias are blooming;...

Is RSS Dying?

Posted on 2011-12-13
This item has been sitting in my draft folder for a long time. In December of 2010, Experian Hitwise published statistical data on the most popular search terms. According to their data, “facebook login” was the second most frequent term...
recent from Funny My Blackberry Is Not Working
I just powered down for the Christmas weekend. If you are out and about browsing the Internet, here’s something funny: *Just in case you didn’t catch it: “Orange” is a cell phone service provider. Share...
recent from 懐かし A Long Time Ago…
I just decided to attend someone’s 50th wedding anniversary next month, and it got me thinking. The most indelible memory of the “Summer of ’61” is without question the building of the Berlin Wall. But some of the events 50 years ago were especially important to me. A lot of my free time (and school...
recent from Watercooler The Inner Child
Click on image In the early 70s, I was working for Collins Publishers in an old and very cold building in Glasgow’s Cathedral Street. Whenever we sat shivering over our documents, we would talk about how much nicer work could be if only management would let us do it in Suva on Viti Levu, where Collins had...
recent from Miscellaneous Scrape And Post
Even after all this time, the Web is still full of surprises. After having published the last post, “A ♥ for Language Blogs,” I thought I’d check how many language blogs out there had done the same thing. One of the results was a blog called Translation details. Their post (http://goo.gl/HNi28), it...