What I did on my Saturday...

Besides translating four short-ish documents, I spent quite a bit of time - probably too much - solving a few issues having to do with PHP.

The primary of these had to do with figuring out how to have the program figure out (a) what glossary file to refer to, as I want to have separate glossaries for different subjects and languages, and (b) how to invoke itself, as that's how the code operates.

With one glossary file, neither of these is a problem: you just specify file name and the name of the program in the code (so-called "hardcoding"). When there are several alternatives, on the other hand, one thing you don't want to do is create multiple copies of the code, each one slightly different, the difference being the specification of the data file and the code itself. Trying to maintain that kind of setup would be a nightmare.

As an alternative, you could create a configuration file that specifies the appropriate information to be used with one copy of the code, but then the code would still need to contain (or generate) some piece of unique data to figure out what specified information to use.

Instead, I learned how to use the WordPress get_permalink() function, which returns a string with the URL of the current WordPress page. By stripping off everything from the URL but the unique page identifier, it turns out I don't need no stinking configuration file, because I can use the identifier as part of the data file name (e.g., fopen("glossary_7.txt", "r")), and in the code for the form on the page (e.g., action="?page_id=7").

I had a beer to celebrate.

Cheers...

Glossary premiere...

I've been going on and on about this program that I wrote that works inside of WordPress and displays the results of glossary database searches. Well, I've finally put it out there, as a beta, on my Terminology Outpost blog.

A beta version of my French and English aerospace word list can be found here. Entering 'tate' will bring up a number of entries.

Entering "activ[ae]" will bring up two entries and illustrate the use of a search using "regular expressions" (in this particular case, search for "activ" followed by either an "a" or an "e").

There's also a Russian and English petroleum glossary at the site.

Now I can turn to the remaining two translations for the weekend with a lighter heart, and the knowledge that I need to pay more attention to my work-related websites.

Cheers...

sic...

Among other cuteness, Latin gives us sic, a syllable that means "thus" or "so," which most often appears when a writer wishes to indicate that quoted material has been rendered exactly, warts and all. Sometimes the use is academic (i.e., "that's what the source says!), and sometimes, it's a form of one-upmanship (i.e., "that's what my illiterate, uninformed, bumpkin-like source says!").

As a translator, I use sic to mean, basically, "Hey! Don't blame me for this dreck!"

I recently had to use this notation quite a bit in a document that had evidently been "adapted" from a document compiled previously for a similar product, where the adaptation was quite sloppy, leaving in numerous references to the other product.

Ah well. No skin off the nose, as they say. (And all those sic references will eventually amount to a tidy amount of cash, too!)

I need to get away from the computer; it's been a long day.

Cheers...

If for no other reason...

As I have noted before (here and here, at least), one of my pet peeves has to do with capitalized glossary entries. Lots of people who compile glossaries capitalize the entries, under the (mistaken, in my view) assumption that... well,... I really don't know,... that it's grammatically "correct," or superior in terms of "style," or maybe that it just looks better, or more uniform.

My complaint with capitalizing entries is that (a) if you follow the glossary's capitalization scheme in your translation, the result is likely to look a bit overheavy with capitals ("Atmosphere Revitalization System Air Duct Fan B4 must be replaced with a Replacement Unit from the Spare Parts Kit"), and (b) if you sensibly don't follow the scheme, there will be times you'll never be sure when a term should be capitalized (is it "freon" or "Freon"?).

Today, in reviewing a glossary of French terminology, I ran across one more good reason not to capitalize entries.

Consider the French entry "Equinoxe d'automne" (as an example). As is often the case in French, accented vowels often lose their accent when capitalized, and thus, the question arises:

Is the uncapitalized word "equinoxe" or "équinoxe"?

Sure, this simple example might be grade school stuff for a native French-speaker, but Dieu! you'd think glossary writers would have some pity - just a smidgen of conscience - for unfortunate shmos like me who are on a lifelong learning curve and frankly, can use all the help they can get in such circumstances! (I mean, multiply the example several hundred times to cover the entries that start with "E", and you'll have an idea of what I mean.)

'nuf said! Down with glossary capitalization!

Cheers...