Northwards Language Services

According to researchers from Amazon Web Services, reported by Vice (RIP), "a huge amount of the internet is machine-translated garbage". Great news for translators, no? I think it does give some hope for the human translators of this world. If the bulk of translation data being used by Large Language Models are themselves misinterpreted data created by machine translation, then surely people are still needed for some time to come, right? There are some caveats though. It may be too late for...

Judgement time Recently, an editor colleague made a passing comment about some tracked changes she was dutifully navigating through. It always seems so judgemental when they are in red, doesn't it? For me this went to the heart of content ownership. Even the most amenable of authors and the most diplomatic of editors are engaged in a sidestep dance to make their mark on a piece of text. People take content personally. And, to some extent, so they should, otherwise what's the point.Fail But it...

Have you ever had to manage a website in many languages and asked yourself - is this worth it?This post makes absolutely no attempt to give any answers or deliver any hope.Language linguineAs a web content manager, there are approximately 5,052 different things to think about, especially around UX, such ashow do I keep all content consistently updated?do I need to?how do I flag in-progress translations?how do I tame simple English menu items in giant Hungarian or German?what do I do with mixed l...

So these are certainly not new ideas. You could even reluctantly admit that they are fully alive and present and show zero hint of ungracefully expiring. But here goes anyway.I'll try to describe two types of the Undead. I take no credit for the first, since it's a well-known ghoul in certain types of writing. Apparently some hero called Dr Rebecca Johnson first devised the concept. The origins of the second are up for debate, but I'll claim it anyway.ZombiesThis species feasts on the passive vo...

There are many phrases by Haruki Murakami that stick with me.  One is in Hardboiled Wonderland and the End of the World. The protagonist is (as usual), a directionless young guy who has fallen in love with a girl but not realised it yet.  He is, not to give too much away, talking with this girl in a library inside his head. Some half-buried threads of instinct make him certain they have met somewhere before. "There was a place, and you were there." I don't really get how such simple words ca...