Today, Last.fm was acquired by CBS, a company who had the first commercial radio station in the US, ran a record label (CBS Records), and amongst other things are responsible for several respected TV series…

That’s today’s blog entry in the new LastFM blog. Simply shocking. I didn’t know CBS even knew that there was Internet radio!

“There is quite a sense of achievement at Last.fm HQ today,” says co-founder Richard Jones. Well, I would feel the same if my bank balance had gone up the reported 320280 million dollars. But not all the listeners had the same reaction.

Seriously, how is a relatively small upstart going to run its affairs independently while being owned by CBS? And is $320$280 million not a bit paltry for a gigantic database of “scrobbled” music data fed in by the reported 2015 million unique users? With the recent antics of the Copyright Royalty Board in the U.S. and the unpredictable outcomes of DMCA-inspired lawsuits, why voluntarily affiliate oneself with a U.S. media company?

As one user said: “Sell-outs! And there was me thinking you were all rock’n’rollers out to screw ‘the man’.”

After a long hiatus, we returned to our Washington museum visits (see here), but this time not on Thanksgiving and without our daughter. We ventured away from the Mall and checked out the National Portrait Gallery, an interesting intersection of art and translation as it is housed in the old Patent Office!

The special exhibition was Great Britons: Treasures from the National Portrait Gallery, London, and it is on through September 3, 2007. You can enjoy the exhibit on-line here. Among the permanent collections, I found America’s Presidents very interesting – the change in clothing, in presentation… And Nixon’s portrait was so small, I did not even see it at first!

I have a confession to make: I intensly dislike TagEditor. I try to avoid using it whenever I can. I am more productive (and happier) when I can do as much of my work as possible in Word: It allows me to integrate my third-party spellchecker; I can define macros for easy keyboard shortcuts to all sorts of functions; it has keyboard shortcuts preprogrammed for almost every menu item; almost all my clients use Word. I know there are issues with Trados piggybacking on Word, but for me, working in the familiar Word environment more than makes up for that. Just my opinion: Pack a decent filter utility into the software and lose the TagEditor. Won’t happen, of course, since it doesn’t chain users tightly enough to Trados, I guess.

The project I am working on right now is reminding me in a big way of the challenges of software translation, and I find that the greatest problem by far is the lack of context. Is “Copy” a copy of something or the verb “to copy”? Is “order” an order or the verb “to order”? “Cancel Order Transfer” – is that cancelling the order transfer or transferring the cancel order? Not to mention old chestnuts like “None,” which needs a number and/or gender in German. Without context, it’s pure guessing. The list goes on.

The client has tried very hard to be helpful by providing some explanations for strings, but interestingly (or perhaps not), those explanations often miss the point. Example: Strings sometimes have placeholders (% or the like), and the gender and number of the placeholder determines the inflection of the remaining string. It would have helped to know what content the placeholder can take on. Instead, the client’s explanation states the obvious: “The % is a placeholder for additional text.”

And so we stumble on through the dark…

(Since my NDA requires me to be silent on specifics, I’m indebted to Claudia Eggert for examples from her session i18n, t9n, l10n — A Secret Code or Aspects of Code Translation? held during the March symposium of MICATA.)

After 2 years, 9 months, and 25 days, the harddrive of my DVR crashed. The good news: I am just renting the equipment for $4 a month, so they are sending me a new box. The bad news: Hours and hours of recordings are simply gone! The harddrive of the DVR is always on, and that’s one problem, I think. There is no need for this thing to spin day and night. The other problem is that the built-in software does not allow external backups. Well, I know why, but it is still a problem. So we will start fresh as soon as the new recorder arrives. Who knows, by the time the new DVR gives out there may be some new technology.

There goes another landmark of my teenage years:

Die Telefilm Saar (TFS), die durch vermutete Bilanzmanipulation in wirtschaftliche Schwierigkeiten geraten ist, wird aufgelöst. Das habe der Aufsichtsrat bei einer Sitzung am Samstagabend entschieden, teilte der Saarländische Rundfunk (SR) am Sonntag in Saarbrücken mit.

Financial Times Deutschland

Laut Online-Ausgabe der Basler Zeitung strebt der Schweizerische Übersetzer-, Terminologen- und Dolmetscher-Verband (ASTTI) „eine Reglementierung des Übersetzerberufs“ an. Es geht dabei um den Abwärtstrend bei Übersetzerpreisen und die „missbräuchliche Verwendung von Anglizismen.“ Gründe für den Preiszerfall und den Qualitätsverlust sieht der Verband in der Internationalisierung der Übersetzungsdienstleistungen.

To make that money, I am working in the wrong language pair. But I guess the danger to my life is not quite the same either.

The average pay for a U.S. citizen working as a translator in Iraq is $176,000, said Walla Ali, director of recruiting for Torres Advanced Enterprise Solutions, a Virginia company with a contract to provide interpreters to the military. Green card holders may also apply, but they must be Iraqi. Their salaries average $144,000, Ali said.

From: DeseretNews.com

Soeben gefunden:

Die Modelle der Flash Voyager Baureihe sind bereits so gut wie unkaputtbar, falls der Speicherstick noch robuster sein soll, bietet sich das Modell Flash Survivor in der verschraubbaren Aluminiumröhre an:

Da hat man als Übersetzer ja kaum noch eine Chance…