Wendy's Blog

I am working on a side project translating Ning into Traditional Chinese.

It’s not as impressive as it sounds. For one thing, bulk of the translation was done and converted from the Simplified Chinese version. My job for the older strings is to make sure they make sense for people who is used to Traditional Chinese. Well, and in the latest release a whole bunch of new strings were introduced, so now I have to make sure they are translated.

It’s not hard at all to translate the site. We made this awesome language editor. From this tool, you can search, find out what is translated, and what is not, etc. The changes happens as soon as you commit in the language editor. So you can check as you go. In addition, if you want to take your translation to another network, just download the translation and upload it to a different network. And if you mess up, we have back ups.

SO GOOD!

But… translation is still hard. I have to scour through the files to make sure the words are used make sense. That’s the tough part, because I don’t really know the technical terms in Chinese. I have no clue how to translate blog, html code, widgets, etc. I have to look them up, and different people use these terms differently. ACK!

What I found the hardest is translating sentences. You can have all the right words, but together they make no sense. Direct translation from English to Chinese just doesn’t work. You have to finesse some culture aspect into it.

What I end up discovering is that Yahoo/Flickr Taiwan is incredible in terms of translation. The translation looks like someone in Taiwan wrote it rather than some US person (i.e. some one like me) using a automated translation tool.

I always have a lot of respect for GOOD translators.

When I was at Borland testing i18n version of JBuilder, we had an automated translated tool. You can translate help file in to French and German. We used to translate into one of these language and then translate back to English. It’s great fun just to see how much it changes between each transformation.

Looking at the automated translation tool (i.e. this one from google : Google Translator), things have not changed much since then. There’s no substitute (yet) for having a human translator.

Enough about work. It’s been a while since I post about my knitting. Here’s one of my latest finished project.

What do you think?

Unloaded:

Fully Loaded and ready to go!

That’s the first thing my brother said to me via IM today. But isn’t it the whole point of the blog? Where you can talk about yourself 24/7?

Anyway, in the spirit of not talking about myself, here’s a story from my brother about his visit to Chicago.

The names and bad language has been modified to protect the innocent.

5:28:20 PM brother: chicago has a nice zoo!
5:28:23 PM brother: we saw gorillaz
5:28:25 PM brother: and one ate its own s**t
5:28:30 PM brother: one was eating its own s**t!
5:28:38 PM me : what?
5:28:47 PM me : off his butt?
5:28:55 PM brother : no
5:29:00 PM brother: he picked up some s**t
5:29:04 PM brother: put it in its mouth
5:29:04 PM me : gross
5:29:06 PM me : eewe
5:29:07 PM brother: and just stood there
5:29:09 PM me : did you take a picture?
5:29:10 PM brother: while everyone took pictures
5:29:11 PM brother: no
5:29:15 PM me : maybe that’s why he’s in the zoo
5:29:19 PM me : because he eats his own poo.

Conversation with my brother via IM today:

brother: Who’s [insert old boss name here]
me : Why? How did you hear that name?
brother: When people send you email, they get this email,

From: noreply@[insert old company name here].com (Noreply)
Date: September 5, 2007 11:38:49 AM PDT
To: [insert brother’s friend email here]
Subject: Re: wine tasting … anyone interested in doing it again ??

Wendy Johnson is no longer with [insert company name here]. Please send your inquiries to [insert old boss name here] [oldBossEmail@oldCompanyName.com]

me : That’s my old boss
brother : Oh. I’ll send email to everyone to remind them.

I don’t know why, but the email made me feel special!

Usually when I leave a company (not very often but sometime it happens) the email just bounces. Having a personalize email letting people know I don’t work there anymore is just totally awesome!

Thank you party people at [insert old company name here] for making me feel special! I would name names, but you know who you are.

I miss you all!

I was looking for “The Sociopath Next Door” and cannot find it anywhere in the house. I remember it being a interesting read, but can’t remember the name of the book.

Most sociopaths are not psycho killers or whatever, most of them are ordinary citizens. They could be your neighbor, boss, sister, brother, etc. At 2005 (when the book was written), she estimated about 1 out of 25 people you know are sociopaths.

The author does an excellent job about describing and identifying sociopaths and how not to get caught in their games. I won’t give away the plot twist here in cases you want to read it.

Anyway, I couldn’t find the book, and didn’t quite remember the name of the book. All I remember is snippet of the book. I vaguely recall that I ordered from Amazon, so I decided to dig through my amazon order history.

I started to browse through the whole history of my relationship with amazon (since 1999). It’s odd looking through the history, it’s like a diary of what I was into and how I was feeling that year. There were one month I ordered a lot of how to break up with someone book in hope that it’ll help me break up with the person. One month I decided I was going to learn more about Irish cooking, so i bought several cook books.

Just see a trend of how I grown as a reader was interesting.

At the end, I didn’t find the book title in my order history. I must have bought it in Borders or something. I end up just doing a search for sociopath in the search field and it was the first book that popped up. And it recommend a few more updated version on the same subject.

I can’t wait!