Reminder that capitalism is the death of art

are you whiny bitches seriously acting like faster and more affordable and more accessible translation is bad? it’s a bad thing? it’s a thing we should be against now? is that seriously where we’ve arrived? can you people think for ten fucking seconds just ONCE?

machine translation is really good for many languages - esp the romance ones - and while its not perfect or anything, like.. i don’t know how to tell you it’s a good thing we’re able to instantly speak to people, 80% accurately, from anywhere in the world

I went through the notes on this post specifically to find this reply - or one like it. Because it has a point, and it’s a decent point for you, the person. But it’s also missing the info of the larger scale problem.

(Or it isn’t; as you rightly point out in the tags, it’s a capitalism problem. But I’ll expand on this point of “capitalism”. I need to rant. I need to scream.)

I’m a professional translator. I work in video games and software, with an occasional dash of literary translation. I’ve worked in translation proper, I’ve worked on editing other people’s work, I’ve led a couple of translator teams. I’ve worked the occasional miracle, working around some Really Dumb Choices the developers made.

(Spoiler alert: other languages have different syntax and grammar, if you give me a list of nouns to translate, and then give me the plural “s” to translate separately, this is not good. Even in English, woman -> womans is dumb.)

I am a fan of making things affordable and accessible. I am really happy that Google Translate and similar things can tell me the gist of what people are saying in conversations I only half care about. As the poster above says, it’s great! Not perfect, but ok!

Do you know what’s not great? Do you know what the OP in the original image means?

The client the original image is talking about isn’t you. It’s not some person on the internet trying to find out what someone said in a Post. The client they’re talking about is, essentially, the corporation: the translation agency, the publishing house, the IT giant.

You, the individual, do not have the power to demand how I do my job. If you come to me and say, “Sarshi, I want you to take this 300-word post, run it through Google Translate, and then charge me half of what you usually do for translating it”, I can take it or leave it.

But I get contacted by agencies - half of them want this. “We have a game, Sarshi! Just post-edit the results of a machine translation!” “We have support articles, Sarshi! We’re paying you a lot less to post-edit the results of machine translation!”

You say it’s ok to have 80% accuracy, and I feel you! Yes, sometimes it is! But companies are like “lol, this works”, too!

It’s happening over and over. And these aren’t… they’re not people, you know? They’re not Auntie May trying to figure out what the dough recipe she got from her niece in Indonesia says. They’re agencies, trying to increase their earnings by promising top quality to companies, then going, “gosh, we said we’d do it for cheap, how can we manage that?”

Or they can even be large companies themselves. Oh, you’ve spent a bajillion trillion dollars trying to create the CryptoNFTVirtualRealityAI hybrid that everybody knew wouldn’t work and now you panic because your earnings are lower than usual? Oh, and you want to “cut costs” by screwing over every contractor you have? Great. Just great.

This is going to screw you over - you, the individual. Not my client, not the translator’s client in general - the company’s client. The corporation is too big to really care about how you feel about their product - the employees individually might, but the company’s only metric is if you buy it or not. And the company makes decisions based on what brings the most money for the least cost.

So your hardware manuals might be crap and you might be in tears because you have no idea how to make your new appliance do the thing. You’ll go on YouTube and you’ll find a solution, and you’ll eventually figure it out. And maybe you’ll forget about the crap manual in time. So next time, they still won’t get a good translator, because they already have a cheaper solution that seems to work.

So your game looks like it was translated by a bunch of rats in a bunker and you can barely understand what anyone’s saying? Well, maybe they got a bottom-feeding agency overpromise that they totally have legit translators working for $1/hour. Pinky swear! Did you buy the game? You did. So… the system worked! They’ll hire the same agency again!

It’s like the clothing industry all over again. We could have better clothes, but it’s cheaper not to. They’re doing us a service by selling us shoes that won’t last a season, and T-shirts that will look like crap after washing them twice - they’re cheap, aren’t they? They’re affordable. Anyone can get clothes. (So you pay more in time are are more frustrated? Who’s counting!)

And meanwhile, it’s easy to forget things might be different. That we have the ability to create good things, pleasant things. That manuals can be easily readable, that games can sound great, that books can be awesome to read. It becomes harder to trust the market, harder to believe in quality, easier to say that this is normal, this is how things just are.

And if you speak English natively, well… You’re at a huge advantage. A lot of stuff is created by your people, for you. For countries like mine, that are small enough to import a lot, nearly everything is translated. I want you to imagine almost all movies subbed, every appliance made elsewhere (with menus needing translated and all), every app in a foreign language. And everybody who can cut costs will try to.

It’s not… it’s not great.

#excellent breakdown #i promise no translator worth anything is against individual people being able to use mt to understand texts and communicate #i’m a translator and i’m a big fan of machine translation in my everyday life but it should not be used commercially #machine translation in commercial products is at worst a health and safety risk #but NOBODY who actually understands the matter is saying that mt shouldn’t exist. for fuck’s sake

via @nailgun-nali

when did tumblr collectively decide not to use punctuation like when did this happen why is this a thing

it just looks so smooth I mean look at this sentence flow like a jungle river

ACTUALLY

This is really exciting, linguistically speaking.

Because it’s not true that Tumblr never uses punctuation. But it is true that lack of punctuation has become, itself, a form of punctuation. On Tumblr the lack of punctuation in multisentence-long posts creates the function of rhetorical speech, or speech that is not intended to have an answer, usually in the form of a question. Consider the following two potential posts. Each individual line should be taken as a post:

ugh is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use like god put that back we have to pay for that stuff

Ugh. Is there any particular reason people at work have to take these massive handfuls of sauce packets they know they’re not going to use? Like god, put that back. We have to pay for that stuff.

In your head, those two potential posts sound totally different. In the first one I’m ranting about work, and this requires no answer. The second may actually engage you to give an answer about hoarding sauce packets. And if you answer the first post, you will likely do so in the same style. 

Here’s what makes this exciting: the English language has no actual punctuation for rhetorical speech–that is, there are no special marks that specifically indicate “this speech is in the abstract, and requires no answer.” Not only that, it never has. The first written record of English (actually proto-English, predating even Old English) dates to the 400s CE, so we’re talking about 1600 years of having absolutely no marker whatsoever for rhetorical speech.

A group of teens and young adults on a blogging website literally reshaped a deficit a millennium and a half old in our language to fit their language needs. More! This group has agreed on a more or less universal standard for these new rules, which fits the definition of “language.” Which is to say Tumblr English is its own actual, real, separate dialect of the English language, and because it is spoken by people worldwide who have introduced concepts from their own languages into it, it may qualify as a written form of pidgin. 

Tumblr English should literally be treated as its own language, because it does not follow the rules of any form of formal written English, and yet it does have its own consistent internal rules. If you don’t think that’s cool as fuck then I don’t even know what to tell you.

i love this post

This is super cool! Also idk if this has any relevance whatsoever but if you wanna have an argument inside one tag you cannot have commas in it so that’s a real existing constraint that has forced tumblrites to construct commaless sentences and perhaps this has helped in adopting the custom into posts as well ok I have no idea if this is what’s happened just I think it’s a reasonable assumption there might be a connection

^this.

The tags are absolutely a factor. You want someone to take a breath in the middle of a sentence, you start a new tag. You want to have, as seen here, this removable piece between commas (does it have a name?) - you have 5 tags in this sentence alone. And sometimes you just

pause in the middle of a sentence…

and let your voice

trail away

look at all you precious brilliant nerds nerding about language you make me so fucking happy omg

language is this constantly evolving thing tbh, it doesn’t remain the same unless it’s dead and the people who used it gone so seeing the evolution of the language used on tumblr is literally so fucking amazing i want to cry with joy at it

because we also add in words from other languages, or make entirely new words up as additional terms to denote something (see ‘tol’ and ‘smol’ in relation to ‘tall’ and ‘small’) and this is constant. we are doing this daily without any sort of breathing space because there’s millions of us on this hellsite and we are constantly talking and so the language changes day-by-day until we have general, universal rules for what to do in a post, what to add in our tags, how to add it, why we add it, what we mean by it

we’ve created a language in the same way our ancestors all did: by building on the ones that came before and changing them to suit our needs and our system

and that’s fucking awesome okay

awesome

I love this so much and language is so great and I’ve noticed the lack of punctuation thing recently, even on twitter, and used it for like a specific kind of rhetorical effect. idk it’s so fun I fucking love linguistics and the evolution of language

I also loved that the following one-word responses all sound drastically different out loud and showcase different reactions:

What?

What.

what

Oh hey! This is the post that caused me to write a thesis. Yall know this post is cited in like five different academic papers that I found while researching for it? @prismatic-bell is a username I see screenshots of in academia these days. P sure they’re in the tumblr book too. Wild. 

I’m sorry, I WHAT?!

One of the first books I read in English as a kid, maybe 1 year after I started learning English, was a booklet with a title like, How to Have a Great Time at Summer Camp. I don’t remember the exact title and I know I only picked it up because the other books in English in my school’s library looked way beyond my level, stuff like Austen and Dickens. The summer camp booklet didn’t look too interesting but it was small with simple sentences. I ended up being fascinated with it because it was the most American thing I had ever got my hands on and it felt impossibly exotic

It would be funny if nuclear waste warning messages become an attraction for future historical linguists.

I mean look at this thing:

A parallel text in 7 languages, with 4 different scripts between them! And pictograms! All designed to be preserved intact!

maybe nothing of value to you is here

in an interesting case of linguistic convergent evolution, the english words scale, scale, and scale are all false cognates of each other

scale as in „to climb“ comes from the latin scala, for ladder.

scale as in the measuring device comes from the old norse skal, for a drinking vessel sometimes used as a weighing device

scale as in the dermal plating on the skin of some fish and reptiles comes from the old french escale, for shell or husk.

Our Japanese class found it funny that in common terminology "food" isn't very distinguished from specifically "rice" until it was pointed out to us that in English "meal" is "loose roughly ground grain"

humans be like staple crop

one of my favourite linguistic phenomena/in-jokes is spanish potato chips being “ham-flavored, probably”

y’see because spain and portugal are so close, labels in stuff like food, shampoo, etc often come in portuguese as well as spanish

this brand of chips, Lay’s, displays the flavor in spanish and portuguese, resulting in ham-flavored chips looking like this:

with “jamón” being spanish and “presunto” being portuguese

however, “presunto” is also a spanish adjective, meaning “presumed” (or suspected)

so you have this in-joke going where spanish chips taste like ham, presumably

You’ve heard of “I can’t believe it’s not butter!” now get ready for “It’s questionable whether or not this is ham”

Every family has their own language.

There are so many implications and questions inherent in this prompt. Go explore them. Go!

Damn

[Image description:

Cropped image of medieval-stylized printed text, focused on a line which reads: “This wenche thikke”

/end image description]

Thank you for adding this image description! Just wanted to clarify that it’s not stylised, but actual Middle English. The text is from The Canterbury Tales.

Okay, had to track it down. It’s from the Reeve’s Tale, and it’s a description of a 20yo young woman:

In modern English (had to look up “camuse”, so that’s as good as my source, but I know the rest)

The fact that Chaucer had “big butt” and “I will not lie” within two lines of each other is causing me disproportionate amusement. Also the fact that “this wenche thikke” works equally well in Middle English and in modern slang.

전라도 사투리 / Jeolla-do Dialect

if anyone is interested in learning 전라도 사투리 here's what we went over in class today. i didn't have time to translate it all into English bc the teacher was talking so fast 😅

1. 거시기 (있다, 하다) - thingamajig

2. 내 기분이 쪼까 거시기 하다 - 기분이 조금 안 좋다

3. 오메 - 어머, 와

4. 아따 - come on/ srsly/ ugh/ 아이고

5. 시방 - 지금

6. 귄있다 - 볼수록 매력이 있다 (to grow on you)

7. 되다 (아따~ 된그~) - 힘들다/ 피곤하다

8. 긍께 (그렁께) - 그러니까

9. 올텡께 - 올 테니까

10. 암시롱 않다 - 아무렇지도 않다

11. 허벌라게 (허버) - 아주/ 굉장히

12. 뒤지다 - 죽다

13. 디지게 - 죽을 만큼 (죽겠다)

14. 오지다 - satisfied/ content

15. 쪼까 - 조금

16. 어찌야쓰까잉/ 어찌까잉 - 어떻게 하지?

17. 짠하다 - 불쌍해서 마음이 아프다

18. 야물다 - 똑똑하다

19. ~디 - ~데 (근데 -> 근디)

20. ~냐 - question

21. ~잉 - (not sure yet, maybe just an extra bit added onto the end of the sentence, but could be similar to ~지요. can anyone fill in?)

22. ~부러 - 버려 (버리다)

23. 했당께 - 했다니까

24. 아따 안 오고 뭐더냐 - 아이고 안 오고 뭐 하냐

25. 디지게 피곤해부러 - 피곤해 죽겠다

Source:

gonna post a controversial take alright are y’all ready??

…

actually typing out emoticons like XD and :D and :V never should have gone out of fashion and you can pry them out of my cold dead hands okay I know emojis are fun but THEY DON’T CAPTURE THE EMOTION IN THE SAME WAY

so like

…yeah that was basically it, thanks for reading

also websites that  automatically replace your typed out <3 and :D with emojis upon sending them are a Danger To Everything That’s Good In The World

bring back nose smilies :-)

There is no emoji that captures what I mean by :P (I do NOT mean “hur hur goofy-ass face!”) and the one for :^/ is not great. And lest we forget, 🤷🏻‍♀️ is absolutely inadequate compared to ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Faces no emoji has ever managed to capture, imo:

:P

^_^

:3

^u^

:/

O.o

0.0

>:/

<(^u^)>

I am too old to stop using XD

i have never yet found an emoji that fully captures the shifty energy of: 

>_>

<_<

Oh man, I’ve missed O.o

Especially alternating to really capture how boggled you are.

O.o

o.O

O.o

Whatever the name of this team is, I am on it

this is   awesome

._. is pretty good too and 😐 just ISN’T THE SAME

XD, ^-^, :3, <3, and =P until death

¬_¬ is the most eloquent keystroke combo

U_U is my fav, and also O_O

the SHEER MISCHIEF of OvO

me af

I use emoji, kaomoji AND emoticons. They all have different moods!!

🤷🏻 is like ‘i have no idea’.

¯\_(ツ)_/¯ is like ‘who knows. nothing in life matters & we were all born to die’

This is part of my webcomic Postcards in Braille, which you can read on ComicFury or Tapastic. Updates on Mondays! 

This comic/guide works well enough on its own, so I thought it’d be nice to post it here as well :D Braille is really cool and you don’t need to be blind or visually impaired to learn it - and spreading the use of Braille can help us build a more inclusive society! everyone wins!

Bonus fun fact: Braille is originally based on Night writing (or sonography), a tactile reading/writing system created for soldiers to communicate silently at night. Louis Braille adapted it into easier to read cells, creating the Braille system. Good to know it evolved into something so useful!

I’m guessing that W being an exception in Braille may have been because Louis Braille was French, and French doesn’t really use the W except in loanwords (for example, French pangrams virtually always contain a loanword to get the W in). 

That’s exactly correct! When Braille was first created W was not part of the alphabet, it being French, and had to be added later for the English alphabet

Check out IPA Braille as well! Fun fact: you can always find it in a Wikipedia article for each sound on the IPA chart :)

Try out some Yonaguni

If you fancy learning a bit more about one of Japan’s lesser known (and sadly endangered) languages, try taking a looking at some of @yonagunilanguageblog​’s resources, both here on Tumblr and on Wordpress:

Yonaguni writing

Yonaguni numbers

Yonaguni language resources

Yonaguni is one of the Ryukyuan languages (or dialects, as classified by Japan), with about 400 remaining speakers and based in the westernmost part of Japan, close to Taiwan, as shown at (1) in this dialect map from The Languages of Japan (Shibatani, 1990):

same with sista, brotha, motha, etc etc

I love this!