I’ve worked on Windows machines with multiple keyboards installed and active, and in my opinion, if all you need one of the keyboards for is to [...]]]> We’ve mentioned Autohotkey in a previous post (and probably will again, in the future). Today’s post has to do with using this marvelous utility to painlessly deal with accented characters.

I’ve worked on Windows machines with multiple keyboards installed and active, and in my opinion, if all you need one of the keyboards for is to type accented characters, you’re complicating your life.

Over the years, I’ve attempted various schemes to enter accented characters, and while some of them work most of the time, I hadn’t ever found a method that works all the time until I tried to implement the following set of hotstrings in Autohotkey.

; ACCENTED CHARACTERS
; * = ending char not required
; ? = trigger even if inside string
; c = case-sensitive

; GRAVE
:*c?:\AG\::{ASC 0192}
:*c?:\EG\::{ASC 0200}
:*c?:\IG\::{ASC 0204}
:*c?:\OG\::{ASC 0210}
:*c?:\UG\::{ASC 0217}
:*c?:\ag\::{ASC 0224}
:*c?:\eg\::{ASC 0232}
:*c?:\ig\::{ASC 0236}
:*c?:\og\::{ASC 0242}
:*c?:\ug\::{ASC 0249}

; ACUTE
:*c?:\AA\::{ASC 0193}
:*c?:\EA\::{ASC 0201}
:*c?:\IA\::{ASC 0205}
:*c?:\OA\::{ASC 0211}
:*c?:\UA\::{ASC 0218}
:*c?:\YA\::{ASC 0221}
:*c?:\aa\::{ASC 0225}
:*c?:\ea\::{ASC 0233}
:*c?:\ia\::{ASC 0237}
:*c?:\oa\::{ASC 0243}
:*c?:\ua\::{ASC 0250}
:*c?:\ya\::{ASC 0253}

; CIRC
:*c?:\AC\::{ASC 0194}
:*c?:\EC\::{ASC 0202}
:*c?:\IC\::{ASC 0206}
:*c?:\OC\::{ASC 0212}
:*c?:\UC\::{ASC 0219}
:*c?:\ac\::{ASC 0226}
:*c?:\ec\::{ASC 0234}
:*c?:\ic\::{ASC 0238}
:*c?:\oc\::{ASC 0244}
:*c?:\uc\::{ASC 0251}

; TILDE
:*c?:\AT\::{ASC 0195}
:*c?:\NT\::{ASC 0209}
:*c?:\OT\::{ASC 0213}
:*c?:\at\::{ASC 0227}
:*c?:\nt\::{ASC 0241}
:*c?:\ot\::{ASC 0245}

; UMLAUT
:*c?:\AU\::{ASC 0196}
:*c?:\EU\::{ASC 0203}
:*c?:\IU\::{ASC 0207}
:*c?:\OU\::{ASC 0214}
:*c?:\UU\::{ASC 0220}
:*c?:\YU\::{ASC 0159}
:*c?:\au\::{ASC 0228}
:*c?:\eu\::{ASC 0235}
:*c?:\iu\::{ASC 0239}
:*c?:\ou\::{ASC 0246}
:*c?:\uu\::{ASC 0252}
:*c?:\yu\::{ASC 0255}

; OTHER
:*c?:\CC\::{ASC 0199} ; french C-cedille
:*c?:\cc\::{ASC 0231} ; french c-cedille
:*c?:\OE\::{ASC 0159} ; O-E ligature
:*c?:\oe\::{ASC 0228} ; o-e ligature
:*c?:\AE\::{ASC 0198} ; A-E ligature
:*c?:\ae\::{ASC 0230} ; a-e ligature
:*c?:\AR\::{ASC 0197} ; A ring (Ångström)
:*c?:\ar\::{ASC 0229} ; a ring
:*c?:\SH\::{ASC 0138} ; S hachek
:*c?:\sh\::{ASC 0154} ; s hachek
:*c?:\ZH\::{ASC 0142} ; Z hachek
:*c?:\zh\::{ASC 0158} ; z hachek
:*c?:\L\::{ASC 0163} ; pound symbol
:*?:\<<\::{ASC 0171} ; left guillemet
:*?:\>>\::{ASC 0187} ; right guillemet
:*?:\euro\::{ASC 0128} ; euro symbol
:*?:\!\::{ASC 0161} ; inverted !
:*?:\?\::{ASC 0191} ; inverted ?
:*?:\0\::{ASC 0176} ; degree sign

As hinted at by the comments at the top of the blockquote, the asterisk between the first two colons in each line tell Autohotkey not to wait for a “separator” character (such as a space or period) to arrive from the keyboard, but to process the hotstring replacement upon arrival of the closing ‘\’ character. The question mark tells Autohotkey to execute the replacement even if we’re in the middle of a string. And finally, the capital ‘c’ tells Autohotkey to distinguish between, say, \ZH\ (which is replaced by Ž) and \zh\ (which is replaced by ž).

Generally speaking, the ‘a’, ‘g’, ‘u’, ‘t’, and ‘c’ second letters correspond to the aigue, grave, umlaut, tilde, and circumflex marks. The letter ‘c’ is also used for the c-cedille, and there are a number of other combinations (e.g., zh) that are roughly the phonetic equivalents of the substituted characters.

Some may think that typing four characters to get one is not efficient. Based on my experience, I must disagree. These hotstrings work, and as far as I can tell, they work everywhere.

One can sense a reason for Ricci’s emotional language: if Chinese had “as many letters [i.e., ideographs] as there are words or things” and if one could learn quite swiftly to subdivide each ideograph into component parts, each of which also had a separate meaning, then [...]]]> From Jonathan D. Spence’s The Memory Palace of Matteo Ricci:

One can sense a reason for Ricci’s emotional language: if Chinese had “as many letters [i.e., ideographs] as there are words or things” and if one could learn quite swiftly to subdivide each ideograph into component parts, each of which also had a separate meaning, then it would be easy for someone well trained in mnemonic art to make each ideograph into a memory image. This process was speeded by the fact that Chinese made an encouraging contrast with Greek grammar, which Ricci had been unhappily trying to teach for some years in India. Unlike Greek sentences, which had to be remembered in all their detailed complexity, a Chinese sentence could be presented in sharp detail as a series of images: as Ricci observed, “What is of help in all this is that their words have no articles, no cases, no number, no gender, no tense, no mood; they just solve their problems with certain adverbial forms which can be explained very easily.”

Just so one doesn’t get the wrong impression, Spence immediately goes on to say it took Ricci another dozen years of focusing his prodigious mental powers on learning Chinese before he got to the point where he could explain his methods in Chinese.

Still, Spence’s is an interesting observation about both mnemonics and the Chinese language.

There is, I am sure, more than enough material in the previous sentence to fuel at least three furious debates. [...]]]> When it comes to literature, there is a school of thought that says works (including translations) over some number of years of age ought to be “rewritten” to make them more accessible to contemporary audiences.

There is, I am sure, more than enough material in the previous sentence to fuel at least three furious debates. Me, I like to keep an open mind, but not so open that things might have a tendency to fall out rather than join what’s already inside. (Think of it as an application of the “доверяй, но проверяй” principle, i.e., trust the dealer, but always cut the cards.)

As a boy, I fell in love—for all the wrong reasons—with a leather-bound edition of The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius, translated by George Long and published in the 1930s by Collins’s Clear Type Press (London & Glasgow). I say “for all the wrong reasons” because, while I could not make much sense of the text, I loved the physical texture of the binding and the compactness of the book. And don’t ask me why, but I was fascinated by the fact that a previous owner of the book had underlined certain passages. It was almost as if that distant stranger was sending me a secret message from the past.

Just recently, I bought a dead-tree copy of the same work, titled The Emperor’s Handbook and translated by C. Scot Hicks and David Hicks, with the perhaps-adolescent notion of marking my copy up the same way as I go through it, so that some potential future reader might experience that same little thrill. (And even if that does not happen, there is still something about holding a book in one’s hands that trumps the lack of mass and volume offered by electronic versions.)

And yet, during a free moment, I was curious, and decided to compare the old and new translations of the following short item, No. 33 from Book XII:

How does the ruling faculty make use of itself? for all lies in this. But everything else, whether it is in the power of thy will or not, is only lifeless ashes and smoke.

(George Long translation, 1862)

Are my guiding principles healthy and robust? On this hangs everything. The rest, whether I can control it or not, is but smoke and the gray ashes of the dead.

(C. Scot and David Hicks translation, 2002)

As a child of the 20th century, I must say I prefer the latter version.

Autohotkey excels in the area of replacing text, so I can roll my own keyboard shorthand, [...]]]> I have been a fan of Autohotkey for some time, and I use it mostly for text replacement, because after typing “technical requirements” for about the 500th time, your fingers start asking your brain: “Is all this work really necessary?”

Autohotkey excels in the area of replacing text, so I can roll my own keyboard shorthand, e.g.

::tekreks::technical requirements

which expands ‘tekreks’ into ‘technical requirements’ as soon as I type a space, tab, comma, period, or any other “end of word” symbol.

Another text replacement trick I use is the correction of what are, for me, typical typing errors. Much as I hate to admit it, somewhere after a few thousand words of text, I start typing “valve” instead of “valve”, and so I’ve created the following shortcut to keep my target text on the straight and narrow:

::vlave::valve

Recently, I learned—the hard way—that Microsoft Word ignores a depressed shift key if, at the same time, you hit the spacebar. In fact, it turns out I almost always hit the spacebar before releasing the shift key.

What made this knowledge particularly frustrating was learning about it while using the standalone Windows version of Wordfast, which launches a long and distracting “job analysis” task upon receiving a Shift & Space key combination.

So on a hunch, I tried the following definition in my Autohotkey code file, with the idea of having the utility interpret the Shift + Space combination as, simply, a Space:

Shift & Space::
Send {Space}
return

And what do you know? It works like a charm!

Such a situation could be due, as it was sometime in October, to a malfunction in the system of servers (from Google, I believe) that delivers Android [...]]]> My DROID X spontaneously rebooted yesterday while trying to install Evernote, and after the operating system reloaded, the Market application showed Evernote as “Installing…” but without any progress.

Such a situation could be due, as it was sometime in October, to a malfunction in the system of servers (from Google, I believe) that delivers Android applications, but even while Evernote was stuck, other applications could be downloaded and updated. The problem was, evidently, on my phone.

I pursued the conventional solution, which involves going to Settings > Applications > Manage Applications > Market and then pressing the Clear cache button, but that didn’t work. And about this time, I noticed that my phone was also trying to download the Twitter application, which I had deleted when I installed TweetDeck, and that it was stuck at “Installing…” as well.

After leaving the phone to charge for a couple of hours, I returned to find no change in the status quo.

It then occurred to me to return to the Market application page under Settings and to press the Uninstall updates button.

That did the trick.

Now, I’m really looking forward to getting reacquainted with Evernote, which I used back in the app’s early days but then abandoned for other tools.

Now, there are [...]]]> After translating a few hundred words of the project due soon after noon today, it became apparent that I had translated the identical text, and recently. As it turned out, the end client had submitted a document for translation to my client that I had translated about three weeks ago for said client.

Now, there are translators of my past acquaintance who would yawn, calmly pour and sip a cup or two of coffee, maybe run their eyeballs over the previously translated text, stretch languorously, and then send off the document and invoice another payday, but the way I see it, taking advantage of an oversight like that—and it’s an oversight even if it was made deliberately—is poor business.

I’ll leave the preachy reasons for why this is so as an exercise for the reader, except for one that I call “the human element.”

The client, you see, is not just some vague corporate entity at the other end of the cloud. In practical terms, there is a human at the other end of the connection who goes by a title such as “Translation Coordinator” or “Project Manager” and who is typically under more pressure to Get Stuff Done™ than a mongoose at a cobra convention.

If it turns out the end client goofed, you’ve given your client an opportunity to shine. If it turns out that the person who sent you the assignment made a mistake, then you’ve just saved them from getting chewed out by their boss. In either case, I’ve found that making the person at the other end of the connection look good translates (pardon the pun) into more assignments, made more frequently.

And what’s really mind-blowing is this: In more cases than I care to count, after I’ve made clients aware of the situation, they’ve instructed me to continue with the assignment and to invoice it.

So now that half of today’s to-do list is punched. I think I’ll go for a walk.

The story is told of a minor 17th century French poet who composed 300 sonnets—or as it turned out, only the rhymes for 300 sonnets—that were lost when his personal papers were stolen. So amused were the poet’s friends at this method of writing poems that a [...]]]> Oh, but wordsmiths love to play games with words.

The story is told of a minor 17th century French poet who composed 300 sonnets—or as it turned out, only the rhymes for 300 sonnets—that were lost when his personal papers were stolen. So amused were the poet’s friends at this method of writing poems that a new word game was born: given a set of rhymed words, write a poem to go with them.

There is a glorious tradition of composing bout-rimé in the Slavic Languages Division of the American Translators Association. Some years ago, a set of rhymes—in English, Russian, or a combination—were solicited from members and a contest of sorts was held. Unlike “traditional” bout-rimé, although all of the rhymes had to be used, their order was at the discretion of the contestant. Herewith were the rhymes:

deadline – red wine
relax – fax
ATA – run away
Viagra – Niagara
facility – humility
крот – перевод
конституция – проституция
бездарный – высокопарный
шок – порошок
вино – бревно
намекает – try it
чёрт – snort
mean – блондин
future – круче
jelly – неужели

When the rhymes are solicited in a public setting, there is almost as much hilarity associated with hearing what rhymes were being contributed as in hearing any final poem. The following was my entry in the contest.

The Rush Job

Just as the time nears to relax,
A ring… a click… my God! A fax!
All sober sense says: “Run away!”
But I’m a pro; I’m “A-T-A.”
Rush job, dear! Да, перевод!
(Живу я как несчастный крот!)
Убираю я вино,
Сижу спокойно, как бревно.
I read. I cough. At last, I snort.
This mad text proves there is a чёрт.
  A snap? A breeze? Oh, неужели?
  Then why’ve my guts turned into jelly?
  Автор, ох! Высокопарный!
  Составлял лишь чуж бездарный.
  The challenge, though, assaults humility.
  Letting fly misjudged facility!
  О том, о сем, текст намекает,
  ”Oh, what the hell,” I say, “I’ll try it!”
    Текст – касаясь проституцию –
    Ухудшает конституцию.
I write. The words form a Niagara.
(The author must have chewed Viagra.)
Tell me, dear, what does this mean:
“он долба … what the hell? … блондин”?
Конец! Не распался в порошок!
Ах, блеск! Какой приятный шок!
I’m just so glad I made deadline.
Time to pour and drink red wine!
But just remember, in the future,
Look up what is meant by “круче”!

Cheers…

Launch Campaign! Developing and Using Rocket and Space Terminology Alex Lane (Saturday, 10:00am-11:00am; All Levels; Presented in: English)

This session will focus on the technical terminology used in the course of a multinational “campaign” to [...]]]> My presentation at the ATA Conference went off on time with something just short of 20 attendees. From all accounts, it was received well.

Launch Campaign! Developing and Using Rocket and Space Terminology
Alex Lane
(Saturday, 10:00am-11:00am; All Levels; Presented in: English)

This session will focus on the technical terminology used in the course of a multinational “campaign” to launch a communications satellite into orbit from Baikonur, Kazakhstan. Besides the terms themselves, techniques will be discussed for developing subject-area terminology from various sources. Terms that are used commonly in the broader rocket and space community will be compared.

A copy of the session’s PowerPoint presentation can be found here.