Everyone's a critic...

It would seem logical that the best sources for terminology would be subject-matter experts who are native speakers. And if you bet this way often, you would end up backing a losing proposition, on the whole.

That's because native subject-matter experts are not necessarily paying attention to how they use language.

Case in point: Two days ago, I was assigned to translate some warning signs into French.

One of them read:

Spacecraft power is on

My first cut in French was

Le satellite est allumé

Not feeling all that comfortable with "allumé" (even though it's a perfectly serviceable word, meaning "switched on"), I decided to check with my wording with one of the French team members. The result of that consultation was

Le satellite est sous tension

Here, "sous tension" has the meaning of voltage having been applied. I thought it sounded better than my try, but at about that time, another French participant came by and, eventually, it was agreed that the following was unequivocally the best:

Le satellite est "on"

I was somewhat surprised, but not very.

My translations of the other signs required two minor tweaks, and the item I just did required a half a tweak before it was good to go.

Apropos of which, Pierre-Louis, one of the French security guys (the one reading about Cathar history on the gage car the other day) asked me during a pause in the fit check if I had studied French at the university. I paused for a second, wondering if this was perhaps a setup for a zinger along the lines of "Well, you wasted your money!" in the event of an affirmative response, but managed to get my paranoia under control before answering. The man was genuinely trying to compliment me.

I have less than an hour left in today's scheduled work. It's been quiet.

Cheers...

Adventures in Word...

When the scrofulous cretins who "upgraded" Microsoft Word for Vista talk about "Compatibility Mode," they're talking about file compatibility and not menu compatibility. Apparently, it never occurred to them that some users might not appreciate the complete rearrangement of the farblegargling menu system using a logic that only they - and newcomers to the application - might find apt, at least not without offering some bone to long-time users.

Some years ago, a company called Paperback Software invoked the ire of the Lotus Corporation by coming out with VP-Planner, a comparatively inexpensive spreadsheet program whose "look and feel" (i.e., menu structure and keystrokes associated with said menu) were identical to that of Lotus 1-2-3. Lotus sued, and won.

Soon after, Borland came out with their Quattro spreadsheet, which included a feature that allowed menus and keystrokes to be defined and saved in a configuration file. One such file that came with the product and provided compatibility with 1-2-3 was the target of yet another Lotus lawsuit, which prevailed as well.

You would think there might be a lesson in Lotus' vigorous defense of its user interface, but it would also appear that any such lesson was lost on Redmond.

Admittedly, if you have internalized the Alt-keystrokes of previous versions, you can still use the program, mostly (the "print preview," for example, used to be Alt-F, V, but is now Alt-F, W, V). Myself, I generally used a combination of Alt-keystrokes and arrow keys, and even occasionally used the mouse to navigate Word menus, so I'm kind of caught in the middle.

Microsoft's engineers also figured that every user of the program needs to have their work reformatted automatically, under circumstances that I do not fully understand as yet (although it is painfully clear that such reformatting changes the effect of some macros). The end result is to make sure that legacy documents look like they were produced by drooling morons who can't tell a space bar from a tab key and who wouldn't know a paragraph style if one walked up to them in broad daylight and relieved itself on their shoes.

I am grateful that Microsoft included a trial of the 2007 product with my HP, because I might have been tempted to buy this poor excuse for an upgrade based on my experience with previous versions. Working with Word 2007 is the first time in a long time that I've found a new version of a program to be palpably painful and cumbersome.

Ye gods.

Cheers...