During our time in Japan, we went to Australia to visit relatives once a year around Christmas. Now that we live in the States, it is only about every four years that we manage to go. We usually stay in Burleigh Heads on the Queensland coast and for the past couple of times in the same apartment building. When I checked their website yesterday, I found this mind-boggling Christmas special. Time to go again, I guess.

Click to see the whole page

I just read “Myths about crowdsourced translation” by Nataly Kelly in the digital edition of MultiLingual, and I just have to respond to “Myth #1”:

Please stop spreading the untruth that post-editing machine translation is this great opportunity for translators. Those who say this have clearly no idea what translation is about. I am having a hard time editing human-translated text. Post-editing machine translation is for a translator what it is for a tennis pro having to play with a rabbit that is blindfolded and using a ping-pong paddle. Please read Peter Durfee’s blog post on this matter. He said it so much more eloquently.

Dem ehrenamtlichen Blogger fällt einfach nichts mehr ein, aber das ist ihm auch egal, weil ja eh alles egal ist. Seit es Blogs gibt, hören die meisten nach einem halben Jahr wieder auf. Irgendwann sind alle Anekdötchen verballert, alle Meinungen gemeint und alle Lieblingsbands vorgestellt worden, dann kommen die Mühen der Ebene und dann ist es plötzlich fad. Auch nichts Neues.

Aus dem Blogblick der Netzeitung.de, die zum Jahresende auf eine automatische, mitarbeiterlose Produktion (ohne Blogblick) umgestellt wird.

Another one bites the dust.

I just spent two days in Saarbrücken to celebrate my aunt’s 80th birthday. She came from Bavaria to live with us in June of 1959, shortly before our famous return “heim ins Reich.” That is why she combined her 80th birthday with a 50 years Saarland celebration. I have tried to recount some of my memories of those days in an earlier post and now found a more eloquent and very readable article in Zeit Online, which I can recommend if you are interested in the subject.

Last week Tuesday, on the evening before the ATA conference started, we all sat at the hotel bar when Robin B. showed up with this hilarious #ATA50 shirt. (Note: This is not an official ATA t-shirt.) Since I took the picture freehand with my Blackberry, it is not entirely focused, but it is still legible. Now that is certainly one way of improving translation quality.

Which reminded me that I had archived a link to ProText: “Gib mir ein T, ein E, ein X, ein T, ein T-Shirt!”

They have some funny, text-related humor on their shirts.

Prices are in Euro, unfortunately, and all of us who earn our money in U.S. dollars know what that means: We cannot afford them and have to wait for a more favorable exchange rate down the line. Or for clients in the Euro zone who pay us in their currency.

If you are of a certain age, the reissuing of the complete Beatles catalog this past September, remastered and in the original U.K. album configurations (more or less), did probably not go unnoticed. Over the past years, one of the big complaints has been that Beatles music was not for sale on-line. Another complaint, though not as loud, has been that the various CDs with Beatles music were of mixed quality. I would go so far to say that my vinyl White Album sounds a great deal better than the CD, crackles and scratches notwithstanding.

The official remastered release addressed the latter problem, but not the former. Until BlueBeat in Santa Cruz County started to sell the remastered Beatles collection on-line for $0.25 per song in relatively high quality – and was promptly slapped with a lawsuit by EMI. Despite the ruling of a federal judge, bluebeat.com did not close down today, and (according to Macworld) their justification for selling what they’re not supposed to sell sounds most intriguing:

… Risan [Mark Risan, co-founder and CEO of Media Rights Technologies, the company behind BlueBeat] told the RIAA’s general counsel Steven Marks that he authored the songs using “psycho-acoustic simulation” so they are new recordings and not subject to copyright restrictions.

When I checked it out the other day, their download speed was far from ideal, but if you want to grab a few of the remastered titles before the law comes crushing down on BlueBeat, hurry. Even if they are psycho-acoustic simulations, they sound pretty good.

Last Friday, during the ATA conference in New York, Eve Bodeux, Corinne McKay, and I co-presented “Web 2.0 Tools for Translation Industry Professionals.” To save trees, we did not have paper hand-outs but posted links to all references and resources on our websites / blogs.

You can find a link to my resources in the navigation bar (or click here). The links Eve and Corinne mentioned are available on Corinne’s blog.

My presentation can be viewed on-line here. Those of my co-presenters are not on-line at this moment.