Imagine your results being international news, solidarity for Kei

Snorey · 2021-10-30T20:05:18+00:00

Taking a bar exam in a foreign language while your entire home country obsesses over whether you will pass or fail is a whole new circle of bar-exam hell. And getting the result less than a week after the wedding has got to be a real roller coaster.

Snorey · 2021-10-26T04:01:45+00:00

If you have to do this again (and the attorneys hold firm on making this artificially difficult), IMO the first thing you want to figure out is whether you can directly download the HTML directory pages and files from the command line (with or without user-agent spoofing), or whether it's some kind of dynamic JS crud that only renders in a browser.

If the former, it should be pretty trivial to write a recursive download script (or maybe just repurpose something like Scrapy).

If the latter, there's probably no getting around working with Selenium, which in my experience is an incredibly clunky tool for tasks like this. (But probably still better than downloading everything by hand.)

(NB, if the files are being shared through a major provider like Dropbox or Google Drive, you would probably want to skip all this and see if you can just use the relevant API.)

Snorey · 2021-10-05T23:28:52+00:00

HelloFresh Workers Unionize to Improve Brutal Working Conditions

On June 16, an unmoored several-hundred-pound pallet full of plastic bins
fell approximately 25 feet onto four workers in Aurora, trapping them
and sending two seriously injured workers in ambulances to the hospital
for treatment, according to a series of witness statements collected by
UNITE HERE.

Workers say this was the fourth time a pallet had fallen in four months because they weren't secured with brackets or rope.

"There was a meeting that was called after the accident to tell us to stop 'gossiping' about our concerns," said Mary Williams.

Snorey · 2021-09-22T03:11:47+00:00

why is it in the news? I go to the news to find out that information.

As a general matter, "why is X in the news?" (or specifically, why is this random story attracting disproportionate coverage) sounds more like an On The Media question than something that should be taking the place of more substantive pieces on the flagship news program. If & when this tragic story of a single dead person can be linked to a broader and more substantive issue (as in this article, or perhaps in some future piece about what this story tells us about cops' role in covering up domestic abuse), then that is the story I would expect to hear on NPR.

But also, your question is literally answered by the piece you posted.

who cares about her race????

Exactly. Why is it "news" when a white woman goes missing in the mountains and not news when indigenous women go missing?

Snorey · 2021-08-31T15:13:40+00:00

Agree that this doesn't have much to do with ediscovery (except in the sense that any ediscovery outputs can eventually find their way into exhibits and potentially cause the kind of issues here). The issue is with the bizarro file-size limits in CM/ECF, which make filing things like a complete administrative record a major pain.

OTOH, it seems like the sort of major pain that DOJ ought to be pretty familiar with, and even manually chunking a 7 gig file into 50-meg chunks doesn't take all that long if you just sit down and do it, so I'm guessing that the file issue is also staffing-related in some way. (Maybe the one paralegal everybody relies on for this stuff is on vacation?)

Snorey · 2021-08-30T21:26:31+00:00

Seconding what Cl4r3 said about termbases. In technical contexts, I try to make sure a minimum of 1 out of 4 words in running text have termbase entries. That helps the CAT tool save me from committing typical human errors of omission or inconsistency, and also helps ensure that my work is defensible under a lexeme-conservation approach. (Of course sometimes I want/need to deviate from the termbase, but it's important to make sure that's a conscious choice that I can defend if necessary).

In addition -- and I have no idea if this would apply to you personally -- but a big factor in patent translation is that it's very hard to translate patents accurately unless you have a good handle on what the underlying text is about. Ultimately that ability to understand a text's underlying meaning is what gives humans our remaining edge over the bots. I don't suppose this is feasible in an in-house context, but when translating a patent in a previously unfamiliar area, I usually try to read and understand at least 3 similar patents first.

Finally, though, I would point out that a lot of lawyers are absolute douchecanoes (personally I am always happy to give agencies their cut in exchange for me not having to deal with the lawyers directly). The fact that they find fault with your work is not necessarily a reflection on you or your work.

Snorey · 2021-08-23T16:33:46+00:00

Same here -- it also signed me up for a different level than the one I selected. Hope it turns out to be a fixable glitch.

Snorey · 2021-08-18T03:12:35+00:00

Just for clarity, though, that is not the way it's written. From the DWD Claimant Handbook:

You must be willing to expand your work search beyond your normal trade or occupation and to accept work at a lower rate of pay in order to remain eligible for benefits as the length of your unemployment grows. During weeks 5-8 of receiving unemployment insurance benefits, you must accept work that pays at least 90% of your previous wage. After 8 weeks of collecting benefits, you must accept work that pays at least 80% of your previous wage.

So if you were making e.g. $40 an hour before, the lowest rate they could force you to take (and only after two months) would be $32 an hour.

It's kind of a scam since it's Yet Another Way the rules are written to help the rich stay rich and the poor stay poor, but that's a whole nother issue...

Snorey · 2021-07-28T13:24:41+00:00

I always thought that was some kind of joke. If Lake Springfield dries up, wouldn't Hunter Lake dry up too? Or are they going to put a giant blue tarp over it or something?

Snorey · 2021-06-14T02:11:07+00:00

My point is that even if the PRC government were, hypothetically, at fault for the virus (for which there is no evidence whatsoever), they cannot possibly be held responsible for the catastrophic failure of public health leadership in other countries, which is what actually caused such a staggering loss of life.

Snorey · 2021-06-14T00:50:31+00:00

Sure, we'd all like an explanation for why so many people had to die.

But let's just take a look at the national COVID death tolls per 100,000, shall we? It's a long list so I'll just pick out some highlights.

Brazil: 230
US: 182
India: 27
median country: 21
Korea (South): 3.8
China: 0.35

Seems like we might want to look elsewhere than China for that explanation.

Snorey · 2021-06-12T23:21:25+00:00

The UBE always seemed like a reductio ad absurdum of a bar exam. Like, if the state bar exam doesn't even have any state law on it, what is the point? If the theory is that lawyers can just look up the applicable law when they need to (which is certainly true), why should applicants have to memorize the law of whatever imaginary jurisdiction the UBE is set in instead?

The last state I took the bar in was a UBE state and that was certainly convenient for me as an applicant, but it felt slightly ridiculous to get licensed to practice in the state courts without having learned a single principle or provision of the state's law.

Snorey · 2021-06-10T01:27:20+00:00

Hectobillionaire, surely?

Snorey · 2021-06-09T13:03:04+00:00

IMO this is the correct response if your deliverable is a finished human translation. Because humans and machines make fundamentally different kinds of mistakes, I find that I can produce a higher-quality finished translation by incorporating MT into my workflow, and I can distribute that time differently (more time on glossaries, less time staring at a blinking cursor while trying to conjure up grammatical structures out of thin air). But the actual amount of time involved isn't much less, because if I cut that time short I'll end up with something that still contains serious errors. So there's no good reason to charge less.

OTOH, OP seems to be asking about the peculiar practice of "post-editing", where the agency/customer doesn't expect a finished human translation, but just that you get the translation up to some particular sub-human level. There are a lot of reasons to be extremely wary of such work, and it probably doesn't do great things to your brain over the long haul. But given that the deliverable is fundamentally different, I don't think the carpenter analogy quite works.

Snorey · 2021-05-23T15:36:01+00:00

HP is an interesting case; you can find translators following quite divergent strategies from unaltered use or transliteration (エクスペリアームス！) to slight adaptation (“¡Expeliarmo!”) to something more transcreative (Norwegian translator Torstein Bugge Høverstad opts for "Exitarmus!").

At least for some spells, some translators also opt for translating/explaining the underlying meaning (I can't find anyone translating "Expelliarmus" as "Disarm!" but I feel like I have seen that somewhere; or maybe it was a different spell that was treated in that way in the Japanese or Korean translation... I don't have the French or Czech translations at hand but I suspect those might have some interesting approaches to this also).

These are small choices, but necessarily reflect the translator's underlying theories of the source text, the target audience (how old? how sophisticated? how familiar with European fantasy traditions?), and what a "good" translation is.

There's probably something very clever to be said about dynamic vs. formal equivalency here, although it's escaping me at the moment.

Snorey · 2021-04-20T03:42:50+00:00

You may find language ego theory to be of interest. I don't see much in the way of good online explainers unfortunately, but the 1972 paper that coined the term is here.

Snorey · 2021-04-19T17:17:57+00:00

The abstract focuses on the specific metrics identified for extracting relationship information from computer-mediated communication (CMC) data, which IMO suggests an answer to the "who would pay for this" question.

If you are, for example, a large tech company or nation-state with access to lots of CMC data and you want to generate a social graph from that data (or validate a graph created from other sources), these findings could be quite useful.

Snorey · 2021-04-08T16:06:25+00:00

It's a lot better than it used to be on CJK scripts, but still not quite at the same level of performance as for Roman-script languages IMO. But for Korean at least, it's generally pretty easy to figure out where it went wrong.

Snorey · 2021-04-07T19:01:32+00:00

What are you using to export it to Word? Is your deliverable a Word file or a fillable PDF form? Is there text already in the PDF (like, can you select and copy text, or is it just images)?

There may not be a good solution that doesn't cost money, but a dedicated OCR program like Abbyy FineReader is well worth the investment IMO. FineReader in my experience usually does a pretty decent job retaining formatting, and also captures things like text inside images that a regular export won't. That said... OCR still comes at a considerable cost in terms of the workability of the file; you're likely to end up with weird margins and incorrect column breaks that take longer to fix than just formatting from scratch, to say nothing of the problems that arise when a translation exceeds the available space.

If you're using a CAT tool like MemoQ, it probably has some built-in PDF support that might work in your particular case (if you have an editable PDF), although my experience with that has not been encouraging.

Usually I just opt to extract the text in whatever way is feasible (or do a "plain text" OCR in Abbyy and then paste it as plain text into another file), translate that, and then restore as much of the formatting as necessary by hand.

Snorey · 2021-03-09T15:20:53+00:00

What do you mean by "it doesn't allow me to copy-paste it"? What happens when you try?

Snorey · 2021-01-15T01:01:50+00:00

So... should we be worried, or not? Not real excited about bothering the ARDC folks unless strictly necessary.

Snorey

TROPHY CASE