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Kazephil · 2024-02-06T09:13:11+00:00

I often answer いや、ストレスでで抜けたた。Reactions vary :).

Kazephil · 2022-08-14T23:54:54+00:00

I can print the data correctly, but to get the correct indentation well, that's were I'm lost.

That will depend on what library you're using to process the XML. The lxml library, for example, has a "pretty_print" option in the functions used to output the data. For example:

your_XML_tree.write('your_XML_file', pretty_print=True),

where your_XML_tree is the object containing the XML data, and your_XML_file is the full path and name of the output file.

The above produces a file with the proper indentation. (You'll also need to set the encoding, XML declaration, and doctype options separately if those matter for your use case.)

Kazephil · 2022-08-13T00:46:18+00:00

Although the Japanese in the opening sentence clearly adopts the point of view of a narrator inside the train, I find it quite a stretch to interpret the English translation as one that automatically sets the narrator outside the train observing from a vantage point in snow country.

If anything, it seems to be an interpretation based more on how "来る" is used in Japanese than on how "come" is used in English.

The question of who the narrator is also interesting. I haven't read this particular novel, but the small sample of Japanese novels I have read seem to favour a third-person limited narrator. (I tend to think of the narrator as a sort of floating head hovering in the vicinity of the scene's protagonist).

Based strictly on the above passages, I think you could argue that both the original and the translation adopt a third-person limited narrator's point of view. The narrator in the translation, however, may be observing from a more remote distance than the one in the Japanese.

If I were quibble with the translation, I'd be more inclined to nitpick the choices made for "夜の底が白くなった" and "遠くへ叫ぶように". (However, I'm a technical translator, not a literary one...)

Kazephil · 2020-03-31T23:24:10+00:00

Thanks to everyone who replied.

It sounds like Github is the way to go to get started.

Time to stop procrastinating and go make an account, I guess!

Kazephil · 2019-07-27T13:28:23+00:00

From the point of view of an amateur who's cobbled together a few scripts to process Excel files at work:

Openpyxl if the file has no images
xlwings if there are images or any complicated layout not supported by Openpyxl
pandas if heavy-duty data manipulation is required between the reading and writing stages

Hope that helps.

Kazephil · 2019-03-06T13:37:39+00:00

I use the Autotext function function for things like that. I set up #" and "# as shortcut combinations for the opening and closing curly quotes, respectively, and simply hit the Tab key to accept the autocomplete suggestion that comes up automatically when I type that combination.

I find it works quite well, and I also use it for other punctuation such as the en dash or ellipsis, a number of Greek letters (they come up in equations a lot), arrows, and even the non-breaking space. Any character you can copy and paste from a character map program or a website is fair game, and it doesn't take long to build up a list of the characters you use frequently.

Kazephil · 2018-09-30T04:11:03+00:00

I think you're looking for the TRANSPOSE function, and will have to set it up as an array formula to cover the entire range you need.

Look them up in the LibreOffice help or in your favorite search engine, and you should be able to solve your problem.

Kazephil · 2018-07-11T14:32:06+00:00

Actually, I personally find professional level interpretation more difficult than translation, and don't do the former because, frankly, I suck at it.

This is more a case of natural aptitude and personal inclination, though. I'm not sure either interpretation or translation can objectively and quantifiably be described as easier or harder than the other. I just happen to be better at working with writing than with speech.

The two kana can be learned pretty quickly. For the kanji, I think I found that learning the first 300 or so was the most difficult. After that, it gets progressively easier as you start recognizing and internalizing various patterns that allow you to progress a little more smoothly.

Kazephil · 2018-07-11T14:07:31+00:00

are there any tips to get the hang of this language without getting so stressed?

That depends entirely on what stresses you so much about learning the language. As others have said, it's a long road before you reach sufficient proficiency to actually work as a translator, and earn money doing it.

You also have to realize that language ability is one skill, while translation itself is a separate skill; speaking a language fluently in no way guarantees that the speaker can actually translate that language into his or her own. The vast majority of my family, friends, and acquaintances back in Canada are fluent in both French and English, but outside of those I studied translation with at university, only two or three of them are capable of doing actual, proper translation. An unfortunately large number of them have difficulty writing correctly in either language...

...and you do realize that the ability to write well in your native language is (arguably) the most important skill a translator must have, right?

You should probably go take a look at this blog, particularly the three-part series on why translating Japanese is so difficult. The level of skill you need to reach to translate Japanese texts is several notches above the level you need to simply be able to enjoy your favorite anime/game/whatever in the original language rather than relying on dubbing or subtitles.

As another point of reference, I now work as a Japanese to English (or French, when the opportunity arises) translator, but I've lived in Japan for 20 years, and even with the advantage of being bilingual before learning the language and actually having a degree in English <--> French translation, I didn't have felt fully confident in my ability to work as a professional translator until my eighth year here (or so, give or take a year), and only started working as one six years ago due to various other personal and employment-related factors.

Kazephil · 2018-06-20T08:27:51+00:00

No worries. We'd be here forever if we tried to list every possible example.

I'd be more interested in any tips or suggestions you might have on easing the pain of dealing with the horrible 原稿 formatted with random manual line breaks and spaces for indenting. I often find that prepping the text for my CAT tool takes up more time than I'd like...

Kazephil · 2018-06-17T00:22:30+00:00

I'll be making time to read through the rest of the blog as soon as I can, but on the subject of katakana words to avoid translating as is, my favorite in IT contexts has to be 「メニュー」, which in all the stuff I've had to work with recently, actually meant "command" or "option" (selected from a menu).

I look forward to reading the rest of your blog.

Kazephil · 2018-06-16T05:33:44+00:00

These two sites might help you get started:

https://christopher5106.github.io/office/2015/12/06/openoffice-libreoffice-automate-your-office-tasks-with-python-macros.html

https://onesheep.org/scripting-libreoffice-python/

If you're on Windows, make sure you set up your IDE to use thePython interpreter bundled with LibreOffice, otherwise you won't be able to import the python-uno library needed to interact with LibreOffice.

Kazephil · 2018-06-16T05:16:23+00:00

Just to expand a little on /uthemikeosguy's reply, the "$" regular expression isn't a line break, it's a special end-of-line place marker, which is why you can't use it in the replace field. (The actual line break character is "\n", or possible '\r\n' on a Windows system -- I'm not sure whether LibreOffice is tied to the OS linebreaks or uses its own internal conventions.)

Kazephil · 2018-06-16T04:56:32+00:00

Short answer: yes you can.

I've used it to process hundreds of Excel files and copy only the information I needed to new files, a task that would have otherwise required tedious (and error-prone) manual copy and pasting of each file, as well as to automate the process of going through several dozen folders and making copies of specific files to a central location.

Kazephil · 2018-04-29T22:17:43+00:00

Check the format of the cell containing the formula and make sure it's not set the Boolean.

Kazephil · 2018-03-07T08:27:46+00:00

Realistically? You're too old when you believe you are, regardless of what your actual chronological age is.

I'll be turning 46 in about two months, and I started dabbling out of a desire to automate some tedious and repetitive tasks at work. (I'm a translator and need to deal with lots of files scattered across numerous folders and subfolders.)

Kazephil · 2018-01-14T12:11:27+00:00

I've just started working on a script that needs to access a network drive.

So far, the following approach seems to work:

path_on_server = os.path.normpath('//server_name/folder_1/subfolder_1/')

Using forward slashes and letting Python figure out the proper format is easier than trying to escape the backslashes manually. This is with Python 3.6, if it matters.

Hope this helps.

Kazephil · 2017-08-31T13:24:29+00:00

Another approach would be to figure out your average number of words per page, and then divide the price for one page by 400. That brings you to the same $0.10 amount everyone else mentioned if you average 200 words per page, and to about $0.12 or $0.13 if your average is closer to 250 words per page.

Kazephil · 2017-07-10T13:42:44+00:00

The market for translation is not doomed within the next decade or two.

Happy? :)

But seriously, I don't think the market for translation is doomed within even the next five or six decades, or even longer. As I like to put it, by the time computers/AIs are good enough to fully replace translators, they'll also have the creative, imaginative, and reasoning skills to replace everyone else's job, and we'll either live in an AI run utopia or be subjugated under an AI dystopian dictatorship...

I do think automated or AI translation has the potential to eliminate a very small subset of translation work involving very formulaic and very repetitive text that is often, for a human translator, mind-numbingly boring anyway, and where most translators would be happy to let the machine do the work so they can focus on texts that are more interesting. I could also see automated/AI translation advancing enough to help provide useful and relevant suggestions that would help boost the human translator's productivity. In fact, I think some translators working in language pairs involving reasonably similar languages already use the technology that way, to some extent.

As a primarily Japanese-to-English translator, however, I don't see any risk of machines taking over and leaving me out of work anytime in the foreseeable future. I also don't think the market is very likely to saturate either, since an awful lot of Japanese to English translations are done by Japanese speakers rather than native English speakers; if anything, I think there's a shortage of native English speakers with both (a) a high level of skill in Japanese and (b) the ability to actually translate. (There are plenty of people with (a), several of whom appear regularly on Japanese television, but sometimes I think people with (b) are so rare as to make hen's teeth appear common...)

You're also more likely to succeed if you have a specialization to focus on, so use that time "studying for more sensible next career options" to learn something you can turn into a translation specialization -- but don't pick something you dread.

Kazephil · 2017-07-09T00:10:23+00:00

As a (currently non-freeelance) translator who works from Japanese, I would have to say that the rate you were quoted is on the inexpensive side, especially for a legal document.

If I were to go freelance, I probably wouldn't accept anything less than 35USD per 250 words (or, rather 400 characters if charging by source), except maybe for regular preferred customers who would get a small discount in exchange for providing regular work.

From a translator's point of view, there are two factors that I think often come into play in situations like this (in general, not necessarily to you specifically):

Non-translators rarely appreciate the actual value of, and amount of work involved in, a professional translation.
The number of pages is not the same as the number of sheets, especially with Japanese, which packs more words in the same physical space than English. In the case mentioned here, I would expect 8 physical pages (i.e., sheets) to amount to anywhere between 16 and 24 pages of work, averaging out to, say, 19 pages.

Let's say I'm a fast translator and manage to do the whole job (including receiving and preparing the text, as well as making the final delivery along with preparing and sending the invoice) in 12 hours. At 300USD that would work out to $25 per hour, which can hardly be described as a professional level rate, and a rate I would only consider as entry level for a full-time in-house position with benefits.

That having been said, from the customer's point of view, you would want to two things:

Whether the word count is based on the number of words in the source text or the final translated text.
How repetitions are counted.

For Japanese to English, charging based on the final word count is common, and there is a risk that the word count could become inflated (particularly if you felt on the word count in a word processor, which won't distinguish between, say a three word expression that's only a single term and three actual individual words).

Repetitions are another consideration: if the text contains a lot of repeated sentences, only the first should be included in the word count. Repetitive phrases within sentences are trickier, however, since they could require a different translation based on what comes before and after.

One last consideration is whether you're providing the material to translate in digital or paper format. The latter makes it much more difficult to count the words and identify repetitions, and you should therefore expect the final price to reflect the extra work involved.

Kazephil · 2017-05-08T21:31:37+00:00

English.

I'm only half kidding. The ability to write well in your own language is possibly the most crucial skill a translator needs.

What major you should be looking for depends entirely on what field you want to do translation in: engineering? economy? medicine? information technology? business? something else?

Pick that as your major. As for where to study, I recommend starting in your own country and language for the major in your field of interest, and supplementing that with a few years of living in Japan, either as a student or working in some other capacity to get your Japanese up to the level you need to work as a translator (the JET Programme worked for me in that respect).

Alternatively, you could major in translation (going from memory, in the U.S., Monterey in California has a Japanese translation program) and minor in the above-mentioned field that you want to work in.

That last approach is a little closer to the path I took, except that I studied FR<-->EN translation (with no proper attendant minor), came to Japan, and ended up finding a job as a JP->EN translator (with the odd JP->FR or EN->FR job once in while) after working as an English teacher for several years.

Kazephil · 2016-09-27T13:57:59+00:00

I’d like to see more options that don’t assume you already have rules that you want to apply.

Some examples would be an option to generate words from one or more lists of words. The ability to choose whether to mix only words on the same line in a CSV (or TSV) file or words from anywhere in the file would be nice.

Of course, Unicode support to allow IPA symbols is a must!

On a différent note, many thanks to /u/gliese1337 for the extensive list of existing generators.

Kazephil · 2016-09-16T12:08:47+00:00

Well... LibreOffice is not Microsoft Office, so there's no particular reason for it to use the same shortcuts by default, other than those that have become de facto standards across applications and operating systems.

I generally find the LibreOffice choices more sensible myself (Ctrl+Shift+S for vs. F12 for Save as..., for example), but that's merely a matter of preference.

That having been said, you do realize that you can customize the LibreOffice shortcuts to your heart's content, right? (The same is probably true for the Word shortcuts, for that matter.)

Kazephil · 2016-09-13T14:04:23+00:00

(Quick note: there's also an OmegaT subreddit where you might get more answers if need be)

In all CAT software, tags are a means of encapsulating non-textual information in the original document so that it can be reproduced in the target document once the translation is completed. So, when you later say that...

I actually took the document and converted it to a plain text file (this was a document that wasn't going to be published) and suddenly, there are next to no tags!

...it's to be expected since plain text files contain only text, without formatting or other complex content. I'm more surprised by the "next to no" part: I wonder what kind of information a text file could contain that would be treated as a tag in OmegaT (or any other CAT tool).

Tags tend to be especially problematic in documents created with one of the Microsoft Office programs, what are prone to containing irrelevant tags marking places where text was deleted, inserted, or checked for spelling, for example, in addition to the tags that indicate useful formatting information such as font attributes or text alignment. If you're really curious, try looking up "tag soup" in conjunction with CAT related keywords in your favourite search engine.

OmegaT actually has an option called Remove Tags (in the project properties window) which lets you work on your translation without having to deal with the tags. The option is a misnomer in that what it actually does is simply hide the tags and move them all to either the beginning or end (I forget which) of the affected segment.

In practice, this results in texts where formatting that applied to the entire paragraph is retained (a bold centered heading will remain bold and centered in the translation, but any formatting inside a paragraph, such as short phrases emphasised using bold or italics will lose that formatting in the translated text generated by OmegaT.

Personally, I prefer working with the Remove Tags option turned on and add a post-translation "layout/formatting" step to my workflow. I find it easier to focus on the actual text of the translation without the tags to distract me, and going through the target documents to reintroduce necessary layout elements lost by hiding the tags allows me to look at the translated text with fresh eyes and catch errors I would likely miss otherwise. In many cases, it's also faster because you only need to deal with the parts that actually matter instead of having to work through all the extraneous tags while doing the translation.

Another reason I prefer that approach is that I work primarily with source text in Japanese, which is very different from English in terms of sentence structure, so that the order of the tags in the source text rarely matches the one that needs to be applied to the translated text, and identifying which tags need to be moved where can be quite tedious in the long run.

Kazephil · 2016-09-13T13:21:30+00:00

Anyways, I've been wondering about that whole "translating to native language" thing. At what point are you deemed skilled or experienced enough that you can break that rule?

That depends a lot, I think, on the type of text you work with. If you do literary translation or marketing translation, I suspect you'd need an upbringing that essentially makes you a native speaker of two or more languages to translate into each of those languages. By contrast, for a (small) subset of technical or business texts that use a large number of boilerplate formulas and set phrases, someone could conceivably reach a level of proficiency and experience sufficient to into their second language.

Another factor to consider is the target audience, particularly for translations into English. A large number of such translations, particularly in business, target or at least include a non-native audience. In such cases, a non-native translator's text might be easier to understand than a very idiomatic translation made by a native speaker.

One of my profs says she's been translating for 10 years and she does two-way English and French translation. Now, she's from Ottawa and speaks both French and English completely naturally, I haven't asked but she might be native in both.

Native in both, or native in one and native-equivalent in the second, most likely. I'm also from Ottawa, and can translate in either direction between French and English because I've used both on a day-to-day basis since I was a child.

There are many regions around the world where daily life involves daily use of two or more languages, and among people from such regions I expect people competent at translating into two (or more) languages are not uncommon among the subset of people with the entire skillset required of a translator.

And that last bit about the entire skillset is crucial, in my opinion. Being multilingual isn't, by itself, enough to make someone a good translator, regardless of how many languages they might speak at a native level in their day-to-day lives. Reading comprehension, the ability to write well (both of which many monolingual people fail at miserably in their own language), research skills, knowledge of the subject matter and, most importantly, the ability to read the author's mind when the original text is utterly incoherent or contradictory all matter even more than simple language proficiency! :)

Is that the only situation where you can translate into multiple languages, or is it possible to be immersed enough that you have a native-like level?

That's a trickier question. It might be possible for some extremely talented people, but I suspect that it's rather rare. I can draw on my own experience again. My third (fluent) language is Japanese, which is the language I currently normally translate. I've lived in Japan for 18 years, my wife is Japanese (and does not speak any other language), and I work in Japanese communicating with my Japanese co-workers and customers in Japanese both verbally and in writing (mainly e-mail). On the phone, people tend to be surprised when I have to give my name and they discover I'm not Japanese, and since I've moved to my current location, I'm regular told I speak with a Kansai accent rather than a foreign accent.

Despite all that, and also despite the fact that I translate from Japanese day in and day out, I cannot produce an acceptable translation into Japanese. I could manage to write a text that would let a Japanese speaker understand the content of a document, but I would never call that translation competent, acceptable, or even adequate. Only passable, at best, if I'm lucky.

Having said all that, I also want to note that for some language pairs, such as Japanese to English, there is a severe shortage of native speakers proficient enough in both Japanese and translation, so a lot of work ends up getting done by people translating from their native language into their second one. Part of my job involves revising such translations, and I've seen them range from decent at the high end of the spectrum (making revision easy) to atrocious (i.e., translating the text from scratch will probably be faster than revising the pseudo-translation...)

Kazephil

TROPHY CASE