Since I had been buried under software strings I missed the Thursday Supreme Court decision on personal property seizure by almost two days. Boy, I must have gone through some changes lately because I never thought I would hear me say that I agree with William Rehnquist, Sandra Day O’Connor, Antonin Scalia, and Clarence Thomas! In a stinging dissent, O’Conner argued that cities should not have unlimited authority to uproot families, even if they are provided compensation, simply to accommodate wealthy developers. “The beneficiaries are likely to be those citizens with disproportionate influence and power in the political process, including large corporations and development firms.” Does this mean the city can now just grab my property to build, say, a health club?

Software strings are usually translated way ahead of any other documentation – which leaves the translator often in the dark as to the purpose of the string. Clients may or may not be able to help with detailed information. Usually they do not help.

Unfortunately, gender, number, and case have some bearing on the ending of adjectives, pronouns etc. So what to do with strings like these, totally isolated in a huge table of program strings, with no help whatsoever from the client?

“Add New {0}” “Your {0} has been successfully expired.”

While again flogging the dead-horse metaphor “lost in translation,” this article in Occupational Hazards (The Authority on Occupational Safety, Health and Loss Prevention) makes some excellent points abount Choosing a Translator. I particularly like #10: Always remember: You get what you pay for.

Wow! Didn’t see this coming. I had a long, close look at SDLX in April but was not too convinced that it would bring advantages over Trados. Last Saturday I talked to a colleague who usually works in Trados and had to do a project in SDLX. She complained about the inaccessability of formatting codes and some other, lesser stuff. I guess one of the biggest technical drawbacks of Trados, the fact that it piggybacks on Word, is one of its biggest assets from the standpoint of ease of work.

So what is going to happen? Trados 7 will still be rolled out, it seems, and in the long run, prices will go up (and they aren’t low to begin with). According to heise online, 71% of respondents in a LISA member survey are using Trados, 28% SLDX. But many companies and translation agencies are using more than one translation memory product since each product has its own quirks (“jedes der Programme hat seine Macken”).

One reason more to look out for those smaller programs that often do an amazingly complete job.

Franklin Krohn has published a study in the Journal of Technical Writing and Communication with the title A Generational Approach to Using Emoticons as Nonverbal Communication. The rather obvious result: Younger people like them; older people don’t.

If you need more detailed rules, here the summary:

It is recommended that recipients who are Traditionalists (born before 1946) should not be sent e-mail with emoticons; those who are Baby Boomers (those born between 1946 and 1964) probably should not be sent e-mail with emoticons; those who are Generation Xers (those born between 1964 and 1980) may be sent e-mail with some of the more common emoticons; and those who are termed Millenials (born after 1980 and coming of age after 2000) may be sent e-mail with generous use of emoticons.

“Amelie goes from interpreter working under Fubuki to toilet cleaner.” Roger Ebert writes about the Alain Corneau film Fear and Trembling.

Härting Rechtsanwälte über die Entscheidung des OLG Hamm:

Wer für privat genutzte Internetseiten eine Phantasiebezeichnung als Domainnamen wählt, muss damit rechnen, die Domain aufgeben zu müssen, wenn der Phantasiename mit der Geschäftsbezeichnung eines Unternehmens übereinstimmt … Das Urteil kann weitreichende Konsequenzen für private Nutzer von Internetseiten haben. Unternehmen könnten nämlich privat genutzte „Phantasiedomains“ auch dann für sich beanspruchen, wenn sie Namensrechte an dieser Bezeichnung erst lange nach Registrierung der Domain durch den privaten Nutzer erlangt haben. Das Unternehmen muss nur dafür sorgen, dass es die gewünschte Phantasiebezeichnung in namensmäßiger Weise, z. B. als Bezeichnung im Unternehmensnamen, verwendet.

Since it is Thursday, it must be Germany.

We have (almost) moved. There are still a number of loose ends to tie up … some of the old code does not produce the right results, some of the layout does not render in Firefox. Bear with us. We will get it done.

I have been dealing with migraines all my life. It was worst during my teens. I was sometimes out for days, unable to eat, holed up in a dark room. I couldn’t take pain killers since nothing would stay in my stomach. When I got older, migraines attacked less frequently. For a while, everything seemed fine, but then they came back. About 15 years ago I went through a battery of test, CAT scans and visits with specialists to make sure that they was not some other underlying ailment causing my headaches. There wasn’t.

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