Journaling is often described as the practice of keeping a written record of your thoughts and feelings regarding events in your life. Some of the benefits associated with journaling are reflection, a chance to process events and your reactions to it. It can also help you keep your thoughts organized, set goals, write down ideas. …
One late night I found an unintended use of Geni, an online family tree service. If you're logged in, and you're on someone's profile, Genie will attempt to find a path between you and that person, going through relatives. It's mostly intended to figure out the relation to people on your extended family tree. However, …
Back when I studied translation, one of our teachers told us that corpus research has shown that translated texts tend to have more synonyms for words than original language texts. Most translators know this. Translators have a natural tendency to add more variety to a text. If the same word appears several times in a …
One of the family pastimes, ever since I was very young, was playing Scrabble. At first I played the Hebrew version, "Shabetz-Na". The Israeli sets sold back then were made of light blue plastic tiles, and the letter shapes were not drawn, but embossed. This did not detract from the fun of playing. Later on, …
Three years ago I first learned that October 16 is Dictionary Day, at least in the United States, where they honor Noah Webster on that date, the date of his birth. It's a nice holiday, and being a translator, I'm quite happy to adopt it. It's just over a fortnight after International Translators Day (September …
The madness of Ophelia has been a topic of fascination for critics and directors alike. The fascination for directors was about creativity. Madness can be quite theatrical. A young woman gone mad, speaking in vague sentences, obsessed with flowers. It's visual and dramatic. Madness can indeed be quite theatrical. Critics discussed everything from the role …
Recently I attended the August Penguin – an annual half day event about Linux and open source. The Penguin, specifically a cute Penguin names Tux, is the logo of the Linux operating system. During the one of the breaks I ran into Amir Aharoni, a linguist and a software developer who works for Wikimedia, the …
"Darmok" is an episode of Star Trek – The Next Generation first broadcast in 1991. The exceptional thing about this episode is that the universal translator, the "magic" device they have that instantaneously translates between any two languages, doesn't work. Or rather it works more as we'd expect it to work, it translates words, but …
לפני כמעט שני עשורים, כשרק התחלתי את דרכי בעולם האינטרנט, עבדתי באקטקום, ספקית שירותי אינטרנט, והתחלתי שם בתמיכה טכנית. אחד התפקידים שלקחתי על עצמי בתמיכה היה כתיבת הוראות התחברות. באותה תקופה יצאה לאוויר העולם מערכת ההפעלה Windows 95, בתחילה באנגלית בלבד, ובהמשך גם בעברית. נראה מובן מאליו של-Windows 95 יש לכתוב הוראות התחברות באנגלית, ול-Windows …
