Self-care, not self-delusion

From This Is What ‘Self-Care’ REALLY Means, Because It’s Not All Salt Baths And Chocolate Cake, by Brianna Wiest (via @luliinvierte)

True self-care is not salt baths and chocolate cake, it is making the choice to build a life you don’t need to regularly escape from.

If you find yourself having to regularly indulge in consumer self-care, it’s because you are disconnected from actual self-care, which has very little to do with “treating yourself” and a whole lot do with parenting yourself and making choices for your long-term wellness.

It is becoming the person you know you want and are meant to be. Someone who knows that salt baths and chocolate cake are ways to enjoy life – not escape from it.

A year later...

From Bleed into black, by Canis_chimera (Canis_cosmos), showing once again that fanfiction is in no way a lesser form of literature:

Everything cycles round, Stiles, history repeats itself. But the roles we play can change; the victim may become the victor, the villain may become the hero, because life lets us learn - if we keep an open mind. And we can see each new loop as a fresh chance to do better.

Life lets us learn and be better, if we try.

Me, again

So many things have changed since my last post. And so many things haven't yet changed. But, inspirational quotes, here, have some, both by Christopher Morley, an American novelist, essayist, theater producer...

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.
Read more at https://www.brainyquote.com/authors/christopher-morley-quotes

Read, every day, something no one else is reading. Think, every day, something no one else is thinking. Do, every day, something no one else would be silly enough to do. It is bad for the mind to continually be part of unanimity.

 (thanks, puppernutter, at Distributed Proofreaders)

Big shots are only little shots who keep shooting.

(and myself, for checking the previous quote here, where I found more)

Deep thoughts on lit

When reading sth in an academic manner, I first try to place the author, check their bios, other works, times, themes, and a long etc. Sometimes I research a bit more on the subject if needed. And then I read. And then I read other people's reviews and opinions, to see if what I understood is what is generally understood.

I might be a bit unsure of my reading comprehension skills.

Then, I read Kizmet's mention of Death of the Author, and researched (of course!) till I met this opposing view:

 Death of the Author
...is the birth of the reader.
Death of the Author is a concept from mid-20th Century literary criticism; it holds that an author's intentions and biographical facts (the author's politics, religion, etc) should hold no weight in determining an interpretation of their writing. This is usually understood as meaning that a writer's views about their own work are no more or less valid than the interpretations of any given reader. Intentions are one thing. What was actually accomplished might be something very different. The logic behind the concept is fairly simple: Books are meant to be read, not written, so the ways readers interpret them are as important and "real" as the author's intention. On the flip side, a lot of authors are unavailable or unwilling to comment on their intentions, and even when they are, they don't always make choices for reasons that make sense or are easily explainable to others (or sometimes even to themselves).

In the same page, this Eco quote:

A narrator should not supply interpretations of his work; otherwise he would not have written a novel, which is a machine for generating interpretations.
— Umberto Eco, postscript to The Name of the Rose

Further research, (I'm coping from Wikipedia, that is still the easiest source when properly checked) told me that:

"The Death of the Author" (French: La mort de l'auteur) is a 1967 essay by the French literary critic and theorist Roland Barthes (1915–80). Barthes' essay argues against traditional literary criticism's practice of incorporating the intentions and biographical context of an author in an interpretation of a text, and instead argues that writing and creator are unrelated. The title is a pun on Le Morte d'Arthur, a 15th-century compilation of smaller Arthurian legend stories, written by Sir Thomas Malory.

Result: I've downloaded the essay and am about to read it - it's such a departure from my own approach! It bears investigating.

Also: another proof that fanfiction is a worthwile endeavour.

Happy Holidays?

Trying to post regularly and failing, I will keep posting at random like this quote, from the mouth of one of my fave charas, in a ficlet:

“See,” Tony said, “here’s the thing. New Year’s… it’s just a day. Calendars are random human bullshit that don’t have anything to do with the actual passage of time. Time’s not a series of little circles, over and over again, it’s one big piece, stretching out to infinity in either direction, and we’re just tiny, tiny little blips. Hardly significant at all.”

[...]

“If you want to change your life,” Tony said. “You don’t need to wait until New Year’s to do it. Just… decide you want to improve and get to work on it. You don’t have to wait. Seize the day, and all that.”

Some tips

From tumbl:

Tips For Writing Prompts: #1

• Write / type your prompt. (The sentence, paragraph, or word.)
• Create an outline of what you want to happen in the story.
• Focus on the genre. What kind of story is it? How can you bring forth the overall feeling of the story.
• Listening to a song that relates to the genre of the story could help.
• If the story relates to you think about what happened to you, how you felt, and how it affected you.
• Don’t feel pressured into making your story a specific length. Unless there’s an instructed prompt limit, feel free to make it as long as you’d like. Just make sure you get your point across.
• Always triple check your writing for grammar, spelling, and any errors in general.
• Always accept constructive criticism.

On the English language

I've read this quote or its variations several times. It's been around. It still needs to be here:

The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.

According to Wikipedia, a guy named James Nicoll wrote it in 1990 in the Usenet group rec.arts.sf-lovers, and then went on to be quoted by linguists galore. And the Internet. And a variant:

English doesn't borrow from other languages.
English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over, and rummages through their pockets for loose grammar.

Is it too obsesive to keep tracking variations on the original? Here's one attributed to Terry Pratchett:

English doesn’t borrow from other languages. English follows other languages down dark alleys, knocks them over and goes through their pockets for loose grammar.

Also, the one that made think of looking this up:

Because English beats up other languages in dark alleys, then rifles through their pockets for loose grammar and spare vocabulary.

From the awesome Oxford Dictionaries Blog, taken as is, to have when asking myself this, again:

-Ize or -ise?

Many people visiting the World (non-US) version of our website ask us why we spell words such as realize, finalize, and organize with ‘-ize’ spellings, rather than ‘-ise’. There’s a widespread belief that these spellings belong only to American English, and that British English should use the ‘-ise’ forms instead, i.e. realise, finalise, and organise.

In fact, the ‘-ize’ forms have been in use in English spelling since the 15th century: they didn’t originate in American use, even though they are now standard in US English.  The first example for the verb organize in the Oxford English Dictionary is from around 1425, from an English translation of a treatise on surgery written by the French physician Guy de Chauliac:

The brayne after þe lengþ haþ 3 ventriclez, And euery uentricle haþ 3 parties & in euery partie is organized [L. organizatur] one vertue.

The OED’s earliest example for realize dates from 1611: it’s taken from a definition in A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, a bilingual dictionary written by Randle Cotgrave:

Realiser, to realize, to make of a reall condition, estate, or propertie; to make reall.

The first recorded use of the verb with an ‘-ise’ spelling  in the OED is not until 1755 – over a century later!

The use of ‘-ize’ spellings is part of the house style at Oxford University Press. It reflects the style adopted in the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (which was published in parts from 1884 to 1928) and in the first editions of Hart’s Rules (1904) and the Authors’ and Printers’ Dictionary (1905). These early works chose the ‘-ize’ spellings as their preferred forms for etymological  reasons: the -ize ending corresponds to the Greek verb endings -izo and –izein.

The situation is slightly complicated by the fact that certain verbs must always be spelled with ‘-ise’ at the end in British English, rather than ‘-ize’: this is generally because they have come into the English language in a different way. You can also check out a list of these verbs. The difficulty in remembering which words belong to this group is perhaps one of the reasons that –ise spellings were adopted more widely in British English.

The dictionary on the UK/World side of our website gives alternative ‘-ise’ spellings at the main entries for all ‘-ize’ words where it’s appropriate. In British English, it doesn’t matter which spelling convention is chosen: neither is right or wrong, and neither is ‘more right’ than the other. The important thing is that, whichever form you choose, you should use it consistently within a piece of writing.

Funny English

Taken from 10+ Hilarious Reasons Why The English Language Is The Worst, because.

 

 

Sherlock Holmes' London

These I took from Sherlock Holmes, Victorian Gentleman, at Stanford's Discovering Sherlock Holmes site. Related to the previous post, but worth a post of their own.

The heart of London in Doyle's time

A Bird's-Eye View of the Thames

Transcreation?!

Last week, at the ProZ.com 2016 virtual conference for International Translation Day, one of the sessions was called Transcreation and copywriting, and I was all what?! (I don't know wheter to laugh or cry when these teenagerisms flow out of my fingers). Then I went and lost myself in Google (again). Some notes:

Transcreation is a term used chiefly by advertising and marketing professionals to refer to the process of adapting a message from one language to another, while maintaining its intent, style, tone and context. A successfully transcreated message evokes the same emotions and carries the same implications in the target language as it does in the source language. Increasingly, transcreation is used in global marketing and advertising campaigns as advertisers seek to transcend the boundaries of culture and language. It also takes account of images which are used within a creative message, ensuring that they are suitable for the target local market.
Terms with meanings similar to transcreation include ‘creative translation’, ‘cross-market copywriting’, ‘international copy adaptation’, ‘free-style translation‘, ‘marketing translation’, ‘internationalization’, ‘localization’ and ‘cultural adaptation’. For each of these words and phrases, the thrust is similar: taking the essence of a message and re-creating it in another language or dialect.

Transcreation

Transcreation is a process whereby a highly specialized linguist recreates the source version to be appropriate for the target locale. They key term here is “recreates”, which means reinvent, create again, give new life to, reproduce. This does not mean that materials are created wholly from scratch but the source content can be changed substantially in the process.
Typically, the process of transcreation applies to taglines, product names, slogans and advertisement copy; anything highly branded. Transcreation can also be performed on creative briefs, brand and style guidelines.
Transcreation vs. Marketing Translation? How to Choose the Right Approach

Transcreation combines two words: translation and recreation. The process involves both. Sometimes called creative translation, the aim of transcreation is to adapt a message into another language. The transcreation process involves a lot more creativity than straight translation. There is not the obligation to stay linguistically faithful to the source text, as long as the key message is still conveyed.
Transcreation takes the source text and translates it so that the original message and intent are still explicit. This goes beyond just literal translation. The source text may need to be completely ‘recreated’ so it has the same effect on the target audience. The transcreation process can completely alter the structure, images, even the subject in the source text in order to fit with the target culture and evoke the same emotions.
What is Transcreation?

Three Differences between Transcreation and Translation
1. Source content
2. People
3. Timing
Three Differences between Transcreation and Translation

Transcreation (sometimes called creative translation) is developing or adapting your message for a specific target audience rather than just merely translating existing materials. Transcreation combines new content, culturally adapted content and straightforward translation. Transcreation can include copywriting, image selection, font changes and other transformations that tailor your message to the recipient.

Transcreation enhances your local brand while tailoring it to specific local markets. This service focuses on fluid readability rather than just an accurate word-for-word translation.[...]

5 Key Considerations for Transcreation

1.Transcreation should be performed only into native language.[...]

2.Transcreation provider should be in-country and share location with your target audience.[...]

3.Transcreation provider must be a content expert.[...]

4.Transcreation provider must have extensive copywriting expertise.[...]

5.Transcreation provider must have knowledge and understanding of the target market.[...]

5 Keys to Transcreation Success

You may wonder why a company would want transcreation at all: why don’t they just hire a team of copywriters in the target country who can produce the text from scratch? Well, most clients will want the ‘feel’ of the original text to be maintained, which requires someone who has an intimate knowledge of the source language – they will have to understand why the message works and produce something that is localised for the target language.
The goal of transcreation isn’t to say the same thing in another language. Indeed, it is often not possible to say exactly the same thing in another language. The aim of the game with transcreation is to get the same reaction in each language, something that translation in itself won’t be able to achieve.
Translation vs. Transcreation

Transcreation means ‘translating’ and ‘recreating’ the original text in a new language whilst making sure it is still appropriate in the context for which it is intended. The person producing the transcreation must understand the desired outcome thoroughly, and be given the freedom not only to translate the original but also to make significant changes to it in the process.
Most transcreation projects are undertaken when working with marketing teams.
What is transcreation and how is it different to translation?

Everyday is a wonder of new facts.

Kingsman - 'nuff said

Not only the Kingsmen, but also the knights they were named after:

A gentleman is about the purity of his truth, about commitment to his actions.

(from fanfiction) 

ASCII Art

Last week I was looking for an ASCII heart or something similar, and found these sites. I couldn't use what I found because I have no clue how to change FB's fonts, but hey, maybe next time. In the meantime:

Chris.com - a personal site, with a good gallery.
ASCII Art Dictionary - a personal site too, with ASCII animations! it's old, so beware the links.

Not quite the same, but somewhat related:

Alt-Codes -  list of alt key codes alt symbols and characters - like this: ♥ ♪ ❦!!

Also, 

      ___________________________________ ______________________
    .' In the kitchen,                   | (_)     (_)    (_)   \
  .'   no one can hear you ice cream.    |  ____          ____   }
.',,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,_____|_(    `--------'    )_/ 

http://www.myrkraverk.com/ascii

Word Clouds!

I know word clouds can be an important resarch tool, but I like the way they look. Specially if you manage to get the right text. Or the right genereator. Here are some.

Worked for me:

• Word Clouds for Kids - simple but with some options, and it works very well.
• WordItOut - sends the file by mail.
• WordClouds - the shapes are odd, but there are many options.
• TagCrowd - no shapes, it ends up looking like a simple... tag cloud!
• Word Cloud Generator - odd looking results, but works.

Didn't work right but:

• Wordle - my favourite from last year, but right now it's giving me Java trouble.
• Tagxedo - looks interesting, but it asks me for Silverlight.
• Tagul - interesting looking too, but asks for a login - maybe some other day.

Now, whenever I find where I took note of all the word cloud generators I found last year, I'll edit this list. Probably. Maybe.

Translation!

From OxfordDictionaries.com - Of Cabbages and Kings: five ways to talk about translation:

[...] 

Traduce

Coming from the Latin traducere, meaning “to bring across” or “to transfer”, traduce was used to mean “translate” from at least the fifteen hundreds, and was still in use when Charles Kingsley wrote his novel Alton Locke in 1850: the title character will be allowed no more books to read “If ye canna traduce to me a page o’ Virgil”, so the Scotsman Sandy Mackaye threatens him. The verb is related to words for “translation” in a number of Romance languages: French traduction and Italian traduzzione, for example. The more common sense of traduce now is to slander or disgrace a person. It seems a bit of a leap from “transfer” to “slander”, but the classical Latin traducere could also mean “to lead along (as a spectacle)”, as one might do to a criminal, and in later Latin it carried the sense “to lead astray”, “to corrupt”, and “to blame”. It’s a verb of many talents, and it seems quite fitting that a word for translation should itself have such a variety of possible translations.

Wend 

This is my favourite translation verb, and the oldest of our five. Indeed, this meaning of the word seems to have died out in the twelve hundreds, remembered now only by students of Old English who read King Alfred’s accounts of his efforts at translation: “Ða ongan ic..ða boc wendan on Englisc”; “Then I began to translate that book into English”. The range of meanings that wend had even in those days tells us something about how the Anglo-Saxons thought about translation. It could mean altering your course, changing your mind, travelling, or taking the final journey of death. Translation was a slippery thing, and it could fatally change the meaning of the original text unless great care was taken by a skilful translator.

These are just a few of the many verbs that are or have been used for translation; there was no space to talk about convert, render, interpret, or throw, to name just a few. Dub also lost out in my list of five, though it has the neatest etymology, being a simple shortening of the word double. So there is still plenty to explore in the world of translation; but, for now, I shall wend my way.

For translators-traitors.

Quote of a quote

It was very difficult to find the original article in The New York Times from which many have taken part of this quote as an example of verbification - almost as difficult as it was to find the text of the original article in The Guardian from which William Safire took it, at least acording to someone called sfinx. Not the original article, mind you, but at least the whole text, allegedly publised in The Manchester Guardian, February 8, 1981. Enjoy.

Alexander the Haigiographer:
General Alexander Haig has contexted the Polish watchpot somewhat nuancely. How, though, if the situation decontrols can he stoppage it mountingly conflagrating?  Haig, in Congressional hearings before his confirmatory, paradoxed his auditioners by abnormalling his responds so that verbs were nouned, nouns verbed and adjectives adverbised.  He techniqued a new way to vocabulary his thoughts so as to informationally uncertain anybody listening about what he had actually implicationed.  At first it seemed that the General was impenetrabling what at basic was clear.  This, it was suppositioned, was a new linguistic harbingered by NATO during the time he bell-wethered it.  But close observers have alternatived that idea.  What Haig is doing, they concept, is to decouple the Russians from everything they are moded to.  An example was to obstacle Soviet ambassador Dobrynin from personalising the private elevator at Foggy Bottom.  Now he has to communal like everybody else.  Experts in the Kremlin thought they could recognition the wordforms of American diplomacy.  Now they have to afreshly language themselves up before they know what the Americans are subtling.  They are like chess grandmasters suddenly told to knight their bishops and rook their pawns.  If that is how General Haig wants to nervous breakdown the Russian leadership he may be shrewding his way to the biggest diplomatic invent since Clausewitz.  Unless, that is, he schizophrenes his allies first.

Wordsmith

Well, that was all interesting, but the best bit:

Use the right word, not its second cousin.

Another useful tool

Thanks to ff.net and its thankfully short crash yesterday, I found this site, WebsiteDown.info, which seems to work very well. I'll keep it in mind.

Almost funny truths (but not really)

Took this from someone's tumblr:

Societal expectations of sex don’t make any sense

If dudes are expected to have a lot of sex
But ladies are expected to stay virgins until marriage
But homosexuality is bad
I’m really confused who dudes are supposed to be having all that sex with

Internet (Google) search

Because sometimes I remember this tricks, but mostly I don't.

Word Definitions:

• define:word-i-want-to-understand

Site Specific Search:

• this-word-please site:www.whicheversiteiwantsearched.com

Specific Document Types:

• this-word-please filetype:some-extension

Exclude Words:

• this-word-please -not-this one

Similar Words and Synonyms:

• this-word-please ~or-sth-like-this

This OR That:

• this-word-please OR maybe-this-one

Numeric Ranges:

• this-word-please a-number..another-number (a range, in other words)

Fill in the Blank:

• [ "i'm not * how that idiom * goes" ]