Wednesday’s Forum
Steven L. Taylor
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Wednesday, September 28, 2022
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37 comments
About Steven L. Taylor
Steven L. Taylor is a Professor of Political Science and a College of Arts and Sciences Dean. His main areas of expertise include parties, elections, and the institutional design of democracies. His most recent book is the co-authored
A Different Democracy: American Government in a 31-Country Perspective. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Texas and his BA from the University of California, Irvine. He has been blogging since 2003 (originally at the now defunct Poliblog).
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A question for the gang: who benefits from the NordStream sabotage, and how?
@MarkedMan: Putin claims Russia is under attack by all of the west citing the nordstream sabotage as evidence of it in the hopes that Russians will rally ’round the flag.
I’m not much of a fan of “false flag” theories but that’s all I can come up with. Considering the high number of oligarchs falling out of windows recently, I don’t think it is all that far fetched either.
What is the point indeed.
The company I work for does a lot (a lot) of business with Disney. That’s mostly on the sales side, so I never see it.
Today, a PO came in for a repair. 1 line item: “Check dimmer rack”.
This is followed by a page and a half of internal notes and approvals, and seven pages of “terms and conditions”.
Oh… and a copyright notice on the bottom of each page. Yes… they’re making sure we know that they own the copyright to their purchase order.
@MarkedMan:
People who want Germany to be no-carbon sooner than the politicians are willing to do it. A regime change in Russia is no longer enough to get the Nord Stream back on line. Nord Stream 1 is owned by Nord Stream AG, which is majority-owned by Gazprom, neither of which is in much of a position to finance repairs.
If you see the word “transliterator,” does anything come to mind?
The dictionary definition is useless: one who transliterates.
The definition of transliterate is better: to represent or spell in the characters of another alphabet.
So, assume you have two sentient species, Humans and Aquatics. They both have languages, but neither can reproduce the sounds the other makes. So, to be able to communicate, they take Human standard (aka English), and make word equivalents in Aquatic standard sounds the Aquatics can pronounce. And viceversa.
But then you wouldn’t understand the gibberish that passes for an Aquatic using Human standard in the sounds they can make. So they’d carry a machine that takes the Aquatic sounds of Human standard and converts them to Human standard sounds.
The device doesn’t translate, it transliterates. If an Aquatic spoke Aquatic, the transliterator would make no sense of it. Unless they set it to transliterate their native tongue to the Aquatic-equivalent sounds humans can understand.
Does any of this make sense?
@Kathy: Yeah. Korean written in English alphabet characters is still Korean, and while easier to pronounce than it was before, still means nothing except to the extent the person reading the English characters actually understands Korean.
In reading studies, we talk some of the difference between “phonation,” the ability to pronounce words, and “reading,” understanding what those words mean.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
Yes, like that, but with a spoken rather than written language.
@Kathy:
Transliteration is a word-for-word swap between languages. Translation is conveying the meaning (as closely as possible).
If I ask a Chinese friend how their weekend was and they respond “Ma ma hu hu”…
The transliteration is “horse horse, tiger tiger”
The translation is “just so-so”
Kathy’s First law of fiction says: an author must know absolutely everything that takes place in their story, within the limitations of current scientific and historical knowledge.
Yesterday I finished Dick’s “Time Out Of Joint.” It was odd, but I liked it. What’s really odd is nothing much happens in the first two chapters. They read like the normal, boring, goings on in a small town in the late 50s (1959, to be precise).
I found that interesting, as a look at everyday life in an era that’s different from ours, but doesn’t seem too primitive.
Anyway, at around the midpoint you realize something decidedly weird is going on. By the end, two characters explain everything.
Except one thing.
I found that frustrating. I pretty much caught on to what really is going on, though I didn’t get the players right (hint: it wasn’t the Soviets). But I couldn’t make out what the significance of the slips of paper Gumm found was, if any. And this is never explained.
I don’t care enough to tray to rationalize it, but Dick kind of made it a big deal earlier on.
@Kathy:
You’d think an editor would have caught that.
@CSK:
Total violation of the Chekhov rule.
@Mu Yixiao: “If I ask a Chinese friend how their weekend was and they respond “Ma ma hu hu”… The transliteration is “horse horse, tiger tiger””
Actually, Ma ma hu hu IS the transliteration, as it is rendering Chinese words into the Roman alphabet. Horse etc is not a transliteration but a literal translation.
@wr:
I concur.
I did some translation work for a friend years ago. He wanted literal translations in some parts. I told him if he wanted a word for word literal translation then 1) he should use software instead of paying me and 2) the result would be more akin to gibberish (it was with some early translation software I got my hands on).
I wanted to get across first the meaning, then the style, and last the feel of the original.
Ah, another day in paradise. Ian’s center is only maybe ten miles offshore, but there’s still a wide path cone nearly from Cape Coral to Sarasota, and we’re right in the middle of it in North Port, north end of Charlotte Bay. We’re in the highlands, 15 ft AMSL, which puts us in evacuation zone E, the last designated zone before don’t worry about it. The kids are in zone A, so we’re hosting them and their pets for a couple days. Looks like the eye will pass around 6:00 and wind will fall off fairly quickly from there.
Put the storm shutters up Mon. Feels like 10:00 at night all day because the windows are dark. We’re set with food, water, toilet paper, and fuel for the generator. So far we have power and internet. So we’re feeling pretty snug.
@wr:
Huh. I’ve had it wrong all this time. Learn something new every day.
I thought changing 马马虎虎 to “ma ma hu hu” was Romanization.
@gVOR08: Lakeland is my home town, and much of my family is still there. It’s far from the coast, so no storm surge, but it still looks like they are going to get hit pretty hard.
@Mu Yixiao: lt is Romanization. But Romanization is a form of transliteration.
By the way, the Chinese (government, and pretty much everyone else who speaks Mandarin, and probably other major dialects) have officially adopted a form of written Mandarin known as “pinyin”, which uses Roman characters, plus tone markings. I am competent in reading and producing pinyin – it’s pretty simple – but that doesn’t mean I speak Mandarin, I don’t. I know a couple of phrases is all.
@gVOR08: fingers crossed.
@Kathy: When I was in Korea and using Google Translate to create Korean translations of course policy translated into Korean, I found that it took about 3 or 4 revisions on the English-language side to get a statement that would translate both ways accurately.
Then, I would show it to a Korean friend or maybe an advanced student who would look at it and say “well nobody actually SAYS this, but I understand what you mean, yeah.”*
*A fair amount of the time, the course policy statements that I was translating were things that Koreans don’t say, so asking a Korean student or teacher what to say in Korean would just get you back to “use Google Translate, it’ll be okay.”
@Jay L Gischer:
IIRC, isn’t the increasing use of pinyin primarily a result of the reality that languages lacking an alphabet or syllabary tend to be very difficult to input on keyboards?
@Jay L Gischer:
I’m quite familiar with pinyin. I spent six years in China. 😀
@gVOR08:
I was wondering how you were holding up. We are basically on the other side of the eye from you.
Meanwhile, in the UK:
@gVOR08: @Kurtz:
My sister and brother-in-law, the ones who lost their son last weekend, are in Venice.
@Just nutha ignint cracker:
I deal with government acquisition laws and regulations, mostly state and federal, and with the requests for proposals these laws regulate, and the language is odd, stilted, and contains terms not found in the common course of events.
Translating that would be mostly a matter of knowing the equivalent legal terms in the target language.
@Mu Yixiao: Which would explain your handle, perhaps.
Cool, cool. Just trying to respond to what’s in front of me.
@Stormy Dragon: I took one quarter of Mandarin, where I learned this. My teacher (a native speaker) did complain that computers were reducing the ability of educated Chinese to produce proper characters. It’s actually pretty easy to turn on Characters. Then you type in pinyin, which gives you a list of possible characters, and you pick one. So its slow.
@CSK:
Oh, I didn’t know that. Wow. That’s terrible.
@Jay L Gischer:
They seem to be regretting this. For a few decades they encouraged the learning of English, but now they seem to feel it is causing more problems than benefit. And entering characters on a touch screen, especially a phone, is very easy. Everyone I knew that was younger than 35 used this method unless they were on the computer. Some even used this with their computers touchpad in preference to pinyin
@Kurtz: @CSK: We’re fine. Lost power. Painfully slow 5G internet. I’m in the middle of Ben Bernanke’s self serving, very boring, book.
Venice is 10 or 20 miles further from center, should be less ferocious wind, so should be OK if inland from storm surge. Let me know through James if I can help.
@Jay L Gischer:
Is this actually a problem, or is it the Chinese equivalent of complaining that the Zoomers can’t write cursive?
@Stormy Dragon:
Given how much touch-screens have taken over (especially phones) where writing is a primary source of input, it’s not insignificant.
Also… (especially older) people from different regions–who speak different dialects–will often “write” difficult to understand words using a finger on the palm of their other hand.
@gVOR08:
Thank you.
@Stormy Dragon: I’m no expert on this. It seems to me a real loss in the cultural sense – for both issues. And yet, time does not stand still. We are not frozen in amber.
@Kathy: A U.S. client once gave me a contract offered to them by a Brazilian company. It’s not that I couldn’t get the gist of the contract, but it was very clearly the work of Google translate or similar program and made almost no sense in English language legalese.
@gVOR08: Last night on the news, we saw footage from Naples; a hotel where we stayed 5 years ago was right in the path of the storm surge, with cars floating down the street. Hope everyone in the area came through alive.