Come On, Let's Go. » Uncategorized

Come Into My Parlor

griph — Tue, 30 Mar 2010 20:55:09 +0000

Due to technical difficulties, the rest of this week will be fueled by my good friends and fellow bloggers who have kindly obliged me by filling in while I take care of personal matters.

Tonight's post will be written by Drinky of "Backup Control Room". Perfect!, Wednesday's by Andrew of Armagideon Time and Thursday's by CJ of One Hour Empire.

See you next week, folks!

3-8-2-7-7

Griph — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 01:00:31 +0000

Certain Prides Thus Obliged

Griph — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 22:44:08 +0000

I rode the wrong train home, adding an eight block-long walk to my odyssey from Brooklyn's hip north end. As I plugged away at retaining consciousness on the preceding line, a headful of red wine shifted my attention away from the conductor's garbled announcements and toward the bored young blond sitting across from me. My shirking faculties robbed me of heed for the proper transfer and I boarded my second-choice train, which arrived with a merciful expedience.

It was the wrong end of five in the morning when I came to and debarked – staggered off – at the correct stop in my neighborhood. This was a laudable accomplishment in itself; I was afraid that enjoying a drink and living in Brooklyn's southern boondocks would, yet again, add up to a firm rise-and-shine prodding, indelicately administered by a police officer walking the graveyard terminus beat at Coney Island. I had originally planned to sit out the night, made timid by the radio's apocalyptic pronouncements of the upcoming weather. Fortuitously, the snow had lingered long enough for my night to resolve itself, and lazily tumbled from the stars as I plodded home through the orange silence which descends hand-in-glove with every nocturnal snowfall.

[See post to listen to audio]
Parenthetical Girls - This Regrettable End

Boom

Nära Nerladdningschef

Griph — Mon, 14 Dec 2009 20:50:55 +0000

As I continue to pound through John Donne and Aldous Huxley, I occasionally find time to surf around a bit. Yesterday I discovered something that had me laughing for quite a while.

I'm a card-carrying member of the community blog MetaFitler. Recently someone posted a website featuring angry/snarky Adobe AfterEffects crash reports. A discussion ensued regarding the fact that, as far as software stability is concerned, Adobe seems to be run by the salesmen and not the developers. As an example, one member, effbot noted the following:

After the release that had "close download manager" translated as "nära nerladdningschef" in Swedish, I'm not sure they're run by people at all. Nor computers, for that matter. Not sure what they're using, really.

A few individuals found this pretty funny while the rest of us non-Swedish speakers were left in the dark. Here is his extended explanation, slightly edited for clarity:

I guess something like "near the person in charge of downloads" captures the essence of the Swedish translation pretty well. Seeing that on a button is a rather big WTF in itself, but that's nothing compared to the WTF process Adobe must have been using to come up with this in the first place.

Translating it back to English doesn't really work -- what makes that translation so bizarre is that the words seem to be translated one by one, completely ignoring the context they appear in, and whenever the translator was faced with multiple choices, they invariably picked the wrong Swedish word. Yet, the resulting nonsense has then clearly been tweaked to be grammatically correct, something a computerized word-to-word translation wouldn't have done.

In other words, whoever translated that doesn't know what the words of the language mean, but knows the grammar. That's a bit unusual, and moves this from being just yet another bad translation to a category of its own.

And there you have it. As it turns out Adobe is not run by developers, nor salesmen, nor robots, but idiot-savant grammarians.