Star Wars VIII: The Last Jedi
7 minutes to read
The Jobs Effect
Steve Jobs is not a monster. He is an all-American maverick and a world-class marketing genius. But until a man or woman as powerful as he is arrives at Apple (over his dead body), who is determined to break the cycle he has indulged in for so many years, Apple will remain merely an icon of awe. It will not become a company of the size that truly could (and should) “bury” monsters like IBM.
One minute to read
The Ridge
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xQ _IQS3VKjA
Gorgeous short video of an inspiring ride in a beautiful part of the world, backed with the delicious sounds of Martyn Bennett’s Blackbird.
One minute to read
Reading Roundup
Some years ago (last decade!
) I decided to do a brief round-up of some recent reads. Sadly I don’t find make the time to gather my thoughts and sum up my opinions, so in no particular order, I thought I’d write a few words on some of the books that have graced my bedside table over the past few weeks.
4 minutes to read
memoQ and XSLT: Fun with Namespaces
Using memoQ to translate standard XLIFF (XML Localisation Interchange File Format) files can be made that bit more user friendly when you take advantage of the built-in feature to use XSLT transformations . Since I can’t get my head around namespaces, my simple transformation ended up strewn with unreadable references to local-name() nodes. As ever, there is an easier way.
Take a standard XLIFF file along the lines of:
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xliff version="1.0" xmlns="urn:oasis:names:tc:xliff:document:1.2">
<file source-language="en" datatype="plaintext" original="Project">
<header/>
<body>
<trans-unit id="string">
<source>This is the source content.</source>
</trans-unit>
</body>
</file>
</xliff>
We can identify the nodes in the source using standard XPath syntax having defined the namespaces in the header:
2 minutes to read
memoQ QA Check Tweak
memoQ has a handy little feature as part of its QA check which warns you whenever you double up a word in the target language. I’ve had it catch numerous little and ands and to tos which slip into my work on occasion. However certain combinations of doubled up words are fairly commonplace, which can lead to this feature producing lots of unnecessary false errors. A classic example in English might be two hads in a sentence like ‘I had had enough,’ but that pales in comparison to a language like French, which sees plenty of doubled up words in pronominal verbs (nous nous lavons, vous vous souvenez etc.)
2 minutes to read
On Lady Mondegreen’s Eggcorns
Imperfection is part and parcel of how we communicate, and one of the beautiful things about the evolution of language is how little imperfections can create entirely new constructs, as words and phrases are misheard, misunderstood, misinterpreted and misstated. One of my favourite examples in this regard is the ‘mondegreen’, a term normally used to denote a misheard song lyric, although it originated with a line of poetry:
Ye Highlands and ye Lowlands, Oh, where hae ye been? They hae slain the Earl o’ Moray, And Lady Mondegreen.Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry
2 minutes to read
Language Weirdness
In the weird and wonderful world of words, which world of words is the weirdest? And if we replace ‘weird’ with ‘hard’, we find one of those eternal questions facing language learners: which language is more difficult?
4 minutes to read
2016 in Review
Twelve months down the line, I thought I’d post another year in review
. Again, this post won’t be of any interest to anyone, but here’s a summary of some of the media I’ve consumed over the past year.
11 minutes to read