Same stuff, different day...

I tell you, that's what it feels like.

The work is pouring in again, but I really don't want to talk about it much. One article I did today had a bunch of embedded graphics that insisted on moving around as I typed, often moving from page to page and covering what I was typing. Ye gods.

One of the spreadsheets I'm working on is yielding its dark secrets to me, but slowly. Whoever compiled the thing insisted on using terse, cryptic abbreviations all over the area, and when I first saw them, my first reaction was to drop an e-mail to the agency and ask for a clarification. That idea died after it became clear that what I was really asking them to do was translate the thing for me.

There are still a number of things that make no sense, but overall the file is giving up its mysteries. All it takes are a couple of bamboo shoots, a toothpick, and a sugar cube.

* * *The mushroom soup lasted all of two days. It's all gone. Of course, what with our new policy of not feeding commercial dog food to the dogs (we suspect the sugar in the stuff we'd been giving Sasha may have both precipitated and prolonged her most recent episodes), it's no wonder we're eating ourselves out of house and home.

* * *I am actually feeling pretty chipper today, even if the day went by all too fast. I've embarked on a series of short breaks from translation during which I do some chores that are long overdue (e.g., sweep the garage, which looks like it was last swept out sometime shortly after the Crusades). I find the breaks refresh the mind and the movement makes me feel better.

* * *I've been using the Opera browser on and off for a while and it beats the pants off of IE, in my opinion, although it can get pretty particular about how it deals with sites that don't conform to whatever standards are out there. Today, when I used Opera to bring up www.sokr.ru (a killer site to research Russian abbreviations), I had a heck of a time getting the query form to accept my input (the response looks like it's coming back as UTF-8, which is probably not the same coding as what Opera thinks the rest of the page uses, but that's only a guess).

Actually, I never was able to work with the sokr.ru page, but since I can enter queries with no problem at www.multitran.ru (an excellent Russian-English dictionary site with more than 2 million entries), I'm figuring there's a glitch somewhere.

In any event, I've decided to use Opera as much as possible in the future. I base this decision on the way that Opera and Microsoft handled a recent security problem with their browsers (the former fixed the problem, the latter didn't). In the meantime, I will restrict my use of IE to sokr.ru.

Time to get some rest.

Cheers...

Twice in one day...

Earlier today, one of the folks on the LANTRA-L mailing list posted a query regarding something that Peter Townshend, of The Who, once said about Jimi Hendrix. In the French text she was translating, the quote was:

S'il ne reste qu'un nom dans toute l'histoire du rock'n roll dans cent ans, ne cherchez pas, ce sera forcйment Jimi Hendrix."
Pete Townshend, guitariste des Who

Usually, by the time I read queries like this, about ten people have supplied the answer. This time, however, the best anyone could do was suggest using a reasonably adequate "back-translation" (i.e., take the French, translate it back into English, and put quotes around it. The chances of such a sentence being Townshend's actual words is close to zero, but it's better than nothing.) For the French-challenged, the translator's proposed back-translation was: "If one name remains from the entire history of rock'n roll in a hundred years time, look no further, it will be that of Jimi Hendrix."

Taking up the challenge, I hit Google with the following query:

  "if only one name" Townsend Hendrix

I hit the jackpot, with the following:

"In the whole history of rock'n'roll, even if only one name does survive, don't ask, it will inevitably be Jimi Hendrix."
Peter Townsend (The Who)

Now, leaving aside the possibility that the owner of the website may have either made up the quote, or misquoted it, or whatever, what I found interesting was the fact that I have been happily living my life for the past <mumble> decades under the impression that it was Peter Townsend who played with Roger Daltrey, et alia. But it turns out that his actual name is Peter Townshend.

I got the right answer with the wrong query.

It turns out that if you query Google with

  Townshend "The Who"

and then again with

  Townsend "The Who"

you find they coexist in about a 3-to-1 ratio, which is to say that one in four Web references to The Who's lead guitarist are wrong.

Amazing.

I would not have mentioned it, except that I just got through inserting a photo in a PowerPoint presentation for one of the store's customers, when I noticed a reference to "Zig Zigler" in the text. Now, I've read most of Ziglar's books, which I why I know that his last name is spelled with an 'a' and not an 'e'. So I took the liberty of making the change (No Internet Required™).

The name next to Ziglar's was that of former First Lady Rosalynn Carter. I looked hard at that spelling and hit Google again, and at first, I thought my initial gut feeling was right: it was "Rosalyn," wasn't it? There's a whole bunch of hits that say so.

Then I noticed that the second hit on the list spelled the name with one 'n' in the page title, and with two 'n's in the body. I repeated the exercise with Google, searching for hits on

  "Rosalynn Carter"

and

  "Rosalyn Carter"

With the quotes (so that the search looked for the two words as a single string), "Rosalynn Carter" shows up about 6400 times, while "Rosalyn Carter" yields almost 2000 hits.

Yikes! That's worse than Pete's percentage.

Interestingly enough, if you just look for the two words

  Rosalynn Carter

and

  Rosalyn Carter

you find the former nets 10,400 hits or so, while the (apparently wrong) second alternative weighs in with almost 15,000 hits!

What's with this? Are such misspellings of "people of celebrity" common? Is there anyone else you can think of who must go through life knowing that a goodly chunk of "the public" can't get their name straight?

* * *I guess part of this "mispropagation" occurs when people think to themselves, "Now, how can I check to make sure I'm spelling this person's name correctly?" and come up with getting on the Internet and hitting Google (or some other search engine) with their candidate spelling and stop there.

For example, let me experiment with the query Abraham Lincon...

...um, 1,040 hits, as of today.

A quick survey of the first couple of pages of hits finds most of the errors occur in page titles (i.e., it's "Lincoln" in the body of the page), or are individual typos. Also, many occurrences of "Lincon" occur on Spanish pages (e.g., "A Abraham Lincon, presidente de los Estados Unidos de América"), though a search on Lincoln presidente yields about 26,000 sites, the first page of hits for which are all in Spanish.

Clearly, something is wrong with "Lincon," but unless you question the results Google spits back out at you, it would seem that "Lincon" is a perfectly acceptable way to spell Honest Abe's name, no?

As interesting as this line of thought may be, it's now getting pretty late. You get the idea, right?

Cheers...

P.S. I would never have hit a search engine to check the spelling of PT's name. I simply knew it was Townsend. Period. End of discussion. :^)