Hoard

Getting into a KarAkciddent and splashing 3 cups of FükkenScälden all over myself

HOW IS MY SISTER STRAIGHT UP CARRYING A GUZHENG?????

And when the final villain of DTA isn’t Lucifer but OG endverse dean who went to hell after dying, dethroned him and became the new king. What then

You spend decades thinking on how to destroy capitalism, how to fight Goliath as David. How even scratching the monster in the context of national liberation will be a nightmare. And then Goliath procedes to blind himself, cover himself in gasoline and set himself on fire

Fuck me, the amount of time and effort I put into validating data, and they've gone and added the fucking hallucination generator to it.

well you can't blame them, it's not like excel already had a way to add up numbers or anything

the thing you need to realize about localization is that japanese and english are such vastly different languages that a straight translation is always going to be worse than the original script. nuance is going to be lost and, if you give a shit about your job, you should fill the gaps left with equivalent nuance in english. take ff6, my personal favorite localization of all time: in the original japanese cefca was memorable primarily for his manic, childish speaking style - but since english speaking styles arent nearly as expressive, woolsey adapted that by making the localized english kefka much more prone to making outright jokes. cefca/kefka is beloved in both regions as a result - hell, hes even more popular here

Oh my god, I’m about to go on a ramble, I’m sorry, I can’t help it, the inner translation nerd is coming out. I’m so sorry. The thing is–there is actually no such thing as an accurate translation.  It’s literally an impossible endeavor. Word for word doesn’t cut it. Sense for sense doesn’t cut it, because then you’re potentially missing cool stuff like context and nuance and rhyme and humor. Even localization doesn’t really cut it, because that means you’re prioritizing the audience over the author, and you’re missing out on the original context, and the possibility of bringing something new and exciting to your host language. Foreignization, which aims to replicate the rhythms of the original language, or to use terminology that will be unfamiliar to the target culture–(for example: the first few American-published Harry Potter books domesticated the English, and traded “trousers” for “pants”, and “Mom” for “Mum”. Later on they stopped, and let the American children view such foreignizing words as “snog” and “porridge.”)–also doesn’t cut it, because you risk alienating the target readers, or obscuring meaning.  Another cool example is Dante, and the words written above the gates of hell: Abandon hope, all ye who enter here.  In the original Italian, that’s Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch'intrate. Speranza, like most nouns in latinate languages, has a gender: la. Hope, in Italian, is gendered female. Abandon hope, who is female. Abandon hope, who is a woman. When the original Dante enters hell, searching for Beatrice, he is doomed, subtly, from the start. That’s beautiful, subtle, the kind of delicate poetic move literature nerds gorge themselves on, and you can’t keep it in English. Literally, how do you preserve it? We don’t have a gendered hope. It doesn’t work, can’t work. So how do you compensate? Can you sneak in a reference to Beatrice in a different line? Or do you chalk her up as a loss and move onto the next problem? You’re always going to miss something–the cool part is that, knowing you’re going to fail, you get to decide how to fail. Ortega y Gasset called this The Misery and Splendor of Translation. Basically, translation is impossible–so why not make it a beautiful failure?  My point is that literary translation is creative writing, full of as many creative decisions as any original poem or short story. It has more limitations, rules, and structures to consider, for sure–but sometimes the best artistic decision is going to be the one that breaks the rules.  My favorite breakdown of this is Le Ton Beau De Marot, a beautiful brick of a translator’s joke, in which the author tries over and over again to create a “perfect” translation of “A une Damoyselle Malade”, an itsy bitsy poem Clement Marot dashed off to his patron’s daughter, who was sick, in 1537.  This is the poem:  Ma mignonne, Je vous donne Le bon jour; Le séjour C’est prison. Guérison Recouvrez, Puis ouvrez Votre porte Et qu’on sorte Vitement, Car Clément Le vous mande. Va, friande De ta bouche, Qui se couche En danger Pour manger Confitures; Si tu dures Trop malade, Couleur fade Tu prendras, Et perdras L’embonpoint. Dieu te doint Santé bonne, Ma mignonne. Seems simple enough, right? But it’s got a huge host of challenges: the rhyme, the tone, the archaic language (if you’re translating something old, do you want it to sound old in the target language, too? or are you translating not just across language, but across time?)  Le Ton Beau De Marot is a monster of a book that compiles all of Hofstader’s “failed” translations of Ma Mignonne, as well as the “failed” translations of his friends, and his students, and hundreds of strangers who were given the translation challenge (which you can play here, should you like!)  The end result is a hilarious archive of Sweet Damosels, Malingering Ladies, Chickadees, Fairest Friends, and Cutie Pies. It’s the clearest, funniest, best example of what I think is true of all literary translations: that they’re a thing you make up, not a thing you discover. There is no magic bridge between languages, or magic window, or magic vessel to pour the poem from one language to another–translation is always subjective, it’s always individual, it’s always inaccurate, it’s always a failure.  It’s always, in other words, art.  Which, as a translator, I find incredibly reassuring! You’re definitely, one hundred percent absolutely, gonna fuck up. Which means you can’t fuck up. You can take risks! You can experiment! You can do cool stuff like bilingual translations, or footnote translations! You write your own code of honor, your own rules that your translations will hold inviolable, and fuck it if that code doesn’t match everyone else’s*. The translations they hold inviolable are also flawed, are failures at the core, from the King James Bible right on down to No Fear Shakespeare. So have fun! It’s all in your hands, miseries and splendors both. 

"You'll be left behind if you don't get onboard with AI!" okay let's assume for a second that AI is The Future or whatever. Let's assume that it will be the cornerstone of all future work. Let's assume that, like the investment guys floating on the surface of the bubble are desperate to have us believe, It Is Inevitable. Frankly I still don't think I'd lose much by ignoring it until that day comes. Like I simply do not believe that prompt engineering could take all that long to learn. Call me naive but I think that if AI became critical for my life tomorrow, somebody telling me how to access chatGPT (I imagine they've got a website or an app or something?) and being like "Remember how you used to use google when it still actually worked? Start there" would be enough. I think I could figure it out in like an hour, tops, by fucking around with the site and maybe looking up some tips on reddit. So like. Even if "AI is the future" did somehow magically turn out to be true, I don't see how that affects me at all right now or why anybody bothers saying so. "AI is the future, if you were smart you'd be using it!" no I wouldn't. It still wouldn't be a skill that's worth my time to learn yet. Pointless addition to the discussion. Maybe I'm dunning-krugered or something but I simply do not think that it would be difficult enough that I would need to start practicing right now or I'm missing out on something.

"You'll need AI in a decade so you should get familiar with it now!" I think if you start getting familiar with it now, and I start getting familiar with it in a decade, we're going to end up at the same proficiency pretty quickly. Doesn't seem like the kind of skill where "X years of experience" is relevant. I don't think that's a skill gap that would be hard to close.

You cannot simultaneously have a "it's easy for everyone to learn! Impossible to fuck up!" pitch and a "you MUST learn how to use it RIGHT NOW" pitch for the same product and expect to get taken seriously

Buffy the Vampire Slayer season two finale would be so astonishingly powerful if David Boreanaz could. act. I’m sorry I’m sorry but guys. It’s still astonishingly powerful but Sarah Michelle Gellar is holding up the sky entirely on her own.

my mom’s trans allyship is on another level

she once called my friend’s deadname “that stupid thing his mom calls him”