Linguists Back Tongyong as Symbol of Independence. "Criticism by opposition politicians of the Ministry of Education's decision to adopt Tongyong Pinyin as its official Romanization system is misplaced, linguists claim, saying that the experiences of other countries show that convenience and relevance to the rest of the world should not be the only criteria in deciding such a contentious issue. Other countries have frequently gone their own way in deciding on how their languages are used, supporters of Tongyong Pinyin say." (Read more)

My Mother's New Nose Fell Off During the Night, And the Culprit was Durian. Maybe you came looking for language and translation links, but I cordially invite you to read about nature at its foulest.

Well, if you insist, take a look at these:

The many languages of the Internet- with an overview on some online translation resources.
Cool down the rhetoric about English - The English as a Lingua Franca conundrum and a balanced opinion on the status of English in Japan
F U Cn Rd Ths, So Can Translator - text messaging language is on the rise.

Three Months Ago, My Mother's New Nose Fell Off During the Night. Not really. I've found that a great repository of regional accents is available the British Library. And there is a talk on regional US accents on NPR. Stan also offers you some sound samples with accents from the Northwest of England. And my trivia-hungry brain cells were satisfied to know that birds also have regional accents. Now, what I am really looking for is a sound sample with a speaker from Wisconsin, thank you very much.

Poems for all tastes
Venus and Adonis
Archy interviews a Pharaoh
Party Piece

My Featured Pro Collection

Henry Proz.com Founder

Would you like a jusu with your hambaga? It has been going on for centuries, but now the government says it has gone too far. The Japanese language is being invaded by too many foreign words.

By the way, how do you say 'mouse' in Kannada?

Or translate 22 math and science textbooks in only 5 months?

I know the answer for that one. Very fast.

And should anyone be surprised to find that English is harder to learn than several Latin origin languages?

But the crowning jewel is this one: Harry Potter Shanghaied.

Of Paramount Importance on my Mind Today. Can you tell whether a person is ugly or not by just listening to his/her voice? Or in other words. If Rade Serbedzija had monstruosly nasal vocalization instead of his deep voice and sexy Balkans accent would I still find him hot?

Other than that: is malice a false cognate or is Danilo the bearer of a translatorial revelation?

More Like This. Proof of incestous linking practices. More Like This and Language Museum, via Fabulousness, via Pat.

The History of the World According to Student Bloopers. Posted in the Proz forums.

The Enigmatic Mermaid never willfully infringes copyright. But she doesn't keep up much with patenting activities. This post has been defenestrated. If you want bloopers, consider this book.

Live from Merlandia. Just got an invitation from A. V. to become a correspondent at Transref. Time to repurpose my blog entries!

Scottish Poetry Library. "Do you recognise any of these quotations? If you can help us identify the poet or the poem, write everything you know in the box below. We will be eternally grateful."

"A swan and cygnets nothing more
Background of silver, reedy shore,
Dim shapes of rounded trees,
The high effulgence of a summer sky."

The Guardian's List of Choice Blogs. For the past month, readers have been sending us the URLs of their weblogs. We'll soon be publishing a more comprehensive guide - but until then, here is a list of some of the blogs we liked, with brief notes. If you have a blog, please mail us at weblog@guardianunlimited.co.uk.

I've checked and give my mermological sign of approval to:

one.point.zero
english usage news
americans for a third way

BTW, congratulations Prentiss and James, you're in the list!

Things to do and Foods to Eat in São Paulo. Here's a very complete list of things to do and places to go to in São Paulo. It's an off-the-beaten track and very interesting compilation of all the best São Paulo has to offer. For some visual stimulation, don't miss the graffitti shots of Vila Madalena and other hoods posted by the Girl in Boots.

The Mermaid Jr. as a caipirinha.

Tongue-Tied Companies.Here is an article by David Bowen published yesterday at the Financial Times. Subscription required but copy and paste courtesy of the Antipodean Mermological Data Mining Survey. By the way, the Mermaid doesn't endorse this statement: Yes, machine translation produces clunky and sometimes farcical results - but if you want to communicate with a prospective Portuguese customer, it may be better to offer bad Portuguese than good English.

Almost half of the UK's top 100 companies do not have any foreign content on their websites, according to a study by SDL*, a language specialist. Should we be appalled? Not really.

For one thing, translating a big website is expensive. If a company decides the cost outweighs the benefit, that is a reasonable commercial judgment. For another, the commercial web is still in its infancy; and there is evidence that companies are trying, even if they have not got far yet.

What is worrying is that few organisations have a consistent language policy on what is, after all, the worldwide web. Too often, the result is a mess.

Let's start with the exceptions. Some of the big technology providers have created massive multilingual sites based on a common template. Try International Business Machines (www.ibm.com), Xerox (www.xerox.com) or Microsoft (www.microsoft.com). Vodafone (www.vodafone.com) has an effective approach, too. An eclectic bunch of local sites - in Albanian and Romanian, among others - are grouped in a Vodafone.com frame.

Electrolux (www.electrolux.com) shows that organisation, rather than translation itself, is the key. Most, though not all, national subsidiaries use the same template but have modules of translated content dropped in as relevant. This is localisation, not just translation, at relatively low cost.

I would expect the big travel operators to be fluent in other languages. Some are. Most airlines have a range of non-English sites, though among the giants Delta (www.delta.com) and American Airlines (www.aa.com) reinforce prejudices about American monolingualism.

And why are the big hotel groups so hopeless? The only non-English site I could find was a Japanese one from Marriott (www.marriott.com). "Business users are three times as likely to buy when addressed in their own language," SDL tells me.

Upmarket global brands should surely speak to their wealthy clients in their own languages, yet hardly any do. Even the best efforts, such as Jaguar's (www.jaguar.com), have gone only some of the way. While Japan and big European countries have fully translated sites, Latin Americans have to cope with English, while Scandinavians are offered an Anglo-local hybrid.

Rolls-Royce Motor Cars (www.rollsroycemotorcars.co.uk) has a remarkable multi-language search engine for second-hand Rollers (search in Italian for a car in Belgium), but lacks non-English material on new cars. Burberry (www.burberry.com) is in English only, Le Creuset (www.lecreuset.com) adds English material to its French site but all other material is in English, while Bang & Olufsen (www.bang-olufsen.com) is entirely in English. It is intriguing that non-Anglophone companies often feel that producing a site in English only (B&O is Danish) is sufficient internationalism.

The lack of language policy is even more clear on corporate sites. While many offer plenty of non-English material, it is inconsistent and - just as confusing - inconsistently presented. So GlaxoSmithKline (www.gsk.com) takes us to sites in many different countries from the home page - but clicking on El Salvador, we find nothing in Spanish.

Like GSK, BP (www.bp.com) and HSBC (www.hsbc.com) use intermediate pages to introduce sites for specific countries. Not only are these pages in English but the use of language is also inconsistent. HSBC, "the world's local bank", has an English-only site in that most Francophone African country, Ivory Coast. Unilever (www.unilever.com) has no links to non-English material but if you replace .com with .de you find yourself in a German site. The same trick works with other European suffixes though not, strangely, with .fr.

Final proof that large corporations have yet to get to grips with the language issue comes from the normally impeccably thorough General Electric. The point about this site is that you can find any product or service you want from the home page (www.ge.com) - unless, that is, you want to know about it in a foreign language. Click on "healthcare", and you are sent to an all-English home page. But type in www.gemedical.com and you find an immaculate multilingual offering.

One company that has got it right is Electrolux. It started work on localisation several years ago and developed its own process to allow copy to be translated locally using a split screen. In other words, it has a mass production system whereas the other giants are still largely in the costly age of hand-building.

Where does the expense of translation leave small organisations? Well, they should at least consider machine translation. Yes, it produces clunky and sometimes farcical results - but if you want to communicate with a prospective Portuguese customer, it may be better to offer bad Portuguese than good English.

That is what Queen Ethelburga's school in York (www.queenethelburgas.edu) does. It provides eight languages, including Korean and Japanese, to lure prospective parents.

"This is a computer translation of the original web page," it says. "It should not be regarded as complete or accurate."
Fair enough - though it perhaps would help if the warning itself were translated.

* For more info: SDL International Multilingual Content Survey of FTSE 100 Companies.

Ok, now I would like an Economist article on the gastronomic performance of different polpetone eaters at the cantina Jardim di Napoli.
Maybe I will provide an account myself, that is tomorrow, after my Português para Tradutores course. Look at it like this: you can never know too much Portuguese or have too much sex. Or too many dictionaries and glossaries.

La Lección del Maestro, Part 2. I just wanted to thank with all my heart Marcial Souto, translator of La Lección del Maestro and writer, for sending me over snail mail a copy of the book. This account of the relationship between Jorge Luis Borges and his friend and translator Norman di Giovanni has just hit the bookstores in Argentina and hasn't been translated into Portuguese yet.The book is just beautiful and Marcial Souto's translation is hailed as "magnífica" on the jacket. Who needs a wishlist when one has such wonderful people among one's readers?

Baby Names as Language Parsers. "New evidence shows that babies may use familiar words such as their names to break sentences into smaller parts and understand language." (Read more)

Sigmund Freud Complete Works in New Translation. Next month, the first major translations of Freud's work for over 30 years will be published by Penguin. Under the general editorship of Adam Phillips, the 15 volumes will include Freud on the unconscious, on jokes, and on dreams and hysteria. This large endeavour of scholarship prompts serious questions about the nature of Freud's contribution and his legacy. (Read more)

via glossblog

The Wondrous and Astounding Linguablogs Webring. It's in the making. "And Hermes and Thoth, the gods of language, will run screaming from their browsers, as they realize their stranglehold on all things linguistic has been upended by a ragtag fleet of language nerds." Thanks Pat!

You are a Translator if...

a. You are miserable unless you can get up at 11 a.m. and go to bed at 3:00 a.m.
b. Your working wardrobe consists of jeans (shorts) and sweatshirts (t-shirts), which you store conveniently on the floor of your closet.
c. You are prone to carpal tunnel syndrome and backache.
d. You are alone with a computer all day; when you are with other people you tend to jabber.
e. Your bathrobe is what you are apt to be wearing at 2 in the afternoon.
f. You are sick of looking at four walls all day and are dying to go out to dinner.
g. You know many words in your second language that you do not know how to pronounce.
h. You have met most of the professional colleagues you know through e-mail or Internet chat rooms (or at conferences.)
i. At home you are always working or thinking about work, so the best way to spend quality time with your family is to travel together.
j. You struggle not to gain weight from spending all day sitting on your duff and the constant availability of your refrigerator and your work leaves you little time for exercise.
k. You stay up half the night stewing about how you'll translate a term the next day.
l. Your favorite dictionaries are battered from the rough treatment they get on your desk when you are in a "term - search frenzy."
m. It drives you nuts to be asked if you ever did
'simultaneous translation' for a celebrity.
n. You are chronically tired and short of money, and you suspect that the world underrates how hard you work and how much you contribute.

You are an Interpreter if...I got this checklist from Terry Crispin. And while I don't get annoyed if somebody calls me a simultaneous translator nor travel as much as I would like to on the job, all the rest is pretty accurate.

a. You can rise at 6:30 a.m. many days in a row.
b. Your working wardrobe consists of suits, which you keep wrapped in plastic to avoid wrinkles and expedite packing.
c. You are prone to sore throats and foot problems.
d. You talk all day; in your leisure time, you frequently just want to be quiet.
e. Your bathrobe has been to hotels all over the globe and in half the cities in Brazil. You are sick of hotel and restaurant meals and are dying for home-cooked food.
g. You know many words in your second language that you have never seen written down.
h. You have met most of the professional colleagues you know on interpreting assignments (or at conferences.)
i. You are always traveling and long to be at home more so you can spend quality time with your family.
j. You struggle not to gain weight from constant exposure to banquet and catered meals and your work leaves you little time for exercise.
k. You stay up half the night stewing about the way you interpreted a term.
l. Your favorite dictionaries are battered from rough treatment by baggage handlers.
m. It drives you nuts to have the work you do referred to as 'translation'.
n. You are chronically tired and short of money and you suspect that the world underrates how hard you work and how much you contribute.

Oh Canada. I'm working for Canadians in the booth this week. I have a hard time discerning the Canadian accent from some varieties of American speech. But one thing I noticed. They say about funny. Again, I've received enormous praise for my accent, especially because, according to my speaker, I sound Canadian!! He asked me if I used to live in Toronto. Anyway. The Canadians are fun and they bring us tokens of peace, such as keychains and maple sugar, and on Monday they sang the Canadian anthem because it was Canada day.

On Monday I was kicking myself too. Somebody said "Vou dar o meu pitaco" and it didn't occur to me fast enough that the bestest, most idiomatic translation for this expression was "Here's my two cents". Necessity is the mother of paraphrasing.

Brasil Pentacampeão. Ladies and Gentlemen, it's a fine day for Brazilians. I watched the game at home in my pajamas with Swahili and Preta. I never made it to the brick-oven joint with a large TV where I was supposed to go to for breakfast because Mermaid Jr. woke up late. I missed out on the wholewheat bread and muffins but not on the fireworks and church bell tolling.

Now, can somebody answer me what is that hairdo Ronaldinho is wearing? Looks like a you know what to me.

The Mermaid Jr. and Rafaella were playing "sick baby" with a doll a little while ago. After her nap, I am taking her to see Little Red Riding Hood at the theatre.

I know diddly about soccer, but one statement I read on Veja last week made a lot of sense. They say that there are 140 million soccer coaches in Brazil, but the one who brought us this cup was a soccer fan. Valeu Felipão.

Before Bjork. There was the Queen, the auk and the landscapes of Iceland.

via plep

The Myth of Gay Macho. Speaking of which, I totally liked Hedwig and the Angry Inch. And surprise, surprise: semen acts as an anti-depressant. (thanks to JP for the link)

Ten Lesser Known Facts about my Day Yesterday.
I slept with my phone off the hook because somebody was going to call me at 11.30 pm and I was just feeling too tired and antisocial for the task.
At 10 am I was wearing a helmet and protective glasses, paisley velvet pants and flat-sole shoes. I actually saw with my very eyes the very end of the Brasil-Bolivia gas pipeline. It looked surprisingly small, but then somebody explained to me that that was just the secondary output pipe. I also heard the word thyristor for the first and possibly the last time in my life.
I had lunch in a snack bar operated by an association for the mentally impaired. It was a nice place, under the trees.
I made three phone calls during the day to see how the Mermbaby was doing.
I received confirmation by e-mail that the GET's brother is coming to Brazil in July or August for ten days. He is going to crash at my place.
I gave my phone number to a 30-year old English engineer and shamelessly tried to seduce him. He was very cute.
Nilza had cooked lasagna for lunch. I was disgruntled because my fridge looks like a national park for fattening foods, including apple pie, feijão com paio and maasdam cheese.
I found out that some translations I sent to A. last year were done on a sailboat off Ilha Grande.
I blew my deadline for the radiation therapy software manual again.
I searched my disk for a dams engineering glossary to help a friend. I used to have a bilingual one in an Excel file. Couldn't find it. My friend is so desperate he is talking about flying in from Rio to try to ressucitate one of my defunct laptops.
At 11 pm I put the phone off the hook again because someone was ringing insistently and disturbing my dreams.

Go Brazil. Brazil 1, Turkey 0. Fireworks and deafening screaming in my building. I'm teaching the Mermbaby to jump and shout Brasil, Brasil, Brasil with hands raised, closed fits and a big smile. She is getting the hang of it.

The Curse. Via Les coups de langue, the names of menstruation in French. J'ai l'armée rouge is funny in a napoleonic kind of way. Since we are talking affair de femmes, here are some cunt power links, a menstrual journal and a museum of menstruation featuring more words and expressions para o paquete.

most links via ferocious things

Underwater Cities and Pravda Translations. Over at Caterina, always the good stuff. I left a translatorial note there and only later did I realize that I could also have mentioned that back in the days when I was a scuba diver (aha, new secret revealed), I dived once in a town that was sunk as the result of the building of a dam.

It was a very strange dive. I was not used to diving in fresh water and my belt seemed to weigh a ton, the water was freezing and my fins were too close to the dam(n) floor and raised this awful murky mud. But at certain moments I could make out weird stuff, like a truck tire and a house. Not the most exciting dive in the world, I guess. But we took pictures and the Mergulhar magazine published a story and a photo on our dive. I must have the clipping somewhere.

The Newz. I haven't posted in a while, completely caught up in my byzantine translation projects. Here is the newz you're craving for.

Breadth of content on Web could improve translation technology. (the author has a point there, not your usual yada yada. let's align the Web, tanya)
Translation software lowers language barrier for soccer fans
Make War for Love. (ok it's just a play I'd like to see in line with the seven wonders of the globalized world)
Fermin Guruza, Basquing in Glory. (and a CD I'd like to listen)
FIFA Website Huge Success Story. (they are churning out translations into 6 languages 45 to 60 minutes after the final whistle)

Some Poems. Doug Robinson, organizer of the anthology Western Translation Theory From Herodotus to Nietzsche, has a page with his translations of poems from several languages, including Russian, Spanish, German and Finnish. My favorite are the Serbian poems with variations on the theme "grant me, God, may my honey be hard!" Which I roughly translate as que meu homem esteja sempre em riste (e eu sempre úmida para o meu homem). It's not in the book of common prayer, but it should be. By the way Tangelo where is the translation of Hilda Hilst's naughty witch poem? Also, don't forget to check out his page of translator resources.

ForeignWord Linguablogs. There are two. One is staff-maintained and the other is fed by articles posted by users of Xanadu (neat little software by the way).

retablos, ex-votos and more via gmtplus9

Creative Writing E-Workshop. "Neste site você pode entrar em contato com a literatura nos seus mais diversos níveis -através de jogos, atividades criativas, fóruns, salas de bate-papo, entrevistas, palestras e uma agenda cultural dos principais eventos literários do mês.

Você também tem acesso a textos clássicos e outros criados pelos próprios internautas. Pode conhecer pessoas interessadas em literatura e escritores(as) iniciantes. Encontra espaço para expor seus escritos e, se quiser, terá condições de submeter seu texto à apreciação crítica de escritores já consagrados.

Aqui você pode também encontrar-se quinzenalmente para bate-papo on line com personalidades ligadas ao mundo literário. E tem oportunidade de participar de uma oficina literária virtual, coordenada por João Silvério Trevisan."

They also have weekly chat sessions, every Thrusday from 10pm to midgnight at GMT-3.00 and a metaphor clothesline and a create your poem Flash game.

Confide in Me. I can see how this site could be devastatingly addictive. No sooner had I arrived I was already distributing my wisdom at random like candy on Halloween. Se conselho fosse bom não se dava, vendia.

Now that I've linked let me confide in my readers. Isa has just sent me the article she is translating for the Valor Econômico newspaper on the topic of blogs. I'm not sure if it's Eco or FT.

Guess who they talk about all the time. It begins with Insta. I won't link even if threatened with a horrific death being dragged by monster trucks through the hickvilles of Tennessee. And meanwhile, Limited Inc. writes about Angola starting off with a dilacerating Pasolini quote.

Blind Tangerine is quite mad today and offered to marry me (again?) because he wants to move to Brazil before the end of the Festas Juninas. He says that any antipodean who knows the meaning of sybarite deserves a chance to love him.

confide in me via technoerotica all the rest via my self-referential self

Translating the @. Via Glosses I find a page with a myriad translations of the @ sign and a blog maintained by a Professor of Linguistics of Blogaria University.

A Hybrid of Silicon Valley and Granada. That's the analogy that popped in my head to describe a convention center where I interpreted recently. It was kind of gorgeous, with a beautiful patio area with running streams and fountains and a cozy Italian restaurant 10 steps away. In such pleasant surroundings, I began toying again with the plan of hosting a translation congress in São Paulo. The venue is just perfect, valet parking and Italian wine on the premises. All I need now is to get the sponsors, the speakers and the audience. The powers that be say they're serious if I am serious.

Voltamos logo após nossos comerciais. I'm running a promo at GlossPost with our Greek correspondent, Alex Seidanis, from TranslatorBuyingGroup. Soon he will be the Costco of the translation world, the Trados 5.5 packages are selling like hot cakes. I suggested that in addition to software he begins offering Elsevier dictionaries. I'd love to save some pennies on those. We'll be back right after our commercial break.

Pra Frente Brasil. I know that soccer is not one of the subjects covered by this blog. I'm more interested in papers on translating Jabberwocky and in pages with links to Jabberwocky translations in a thousand languages (via Dave). We also pretend to be not interested in the September 11 translation blunder, but Saint Jerome knows we are quite taken by the news, only not fast enough to blog it before the Hairy Eyeball did.

But I must touch tangentially on the subject to confirm that yes, soccer is the national mania, and to desmistify any people who might doubt that the whole country lies awake at three o'clock in the morning to watch Brazil playing against England in the World Cup. We do. Or rather, most of us do.

Some lay in bed, counting the explosions of fireworks and wild screaming and feeling sleepily invigorated because Brazil scored a goal. Others go to nightclubs to watch the game on big screen TVs, dance, make out with some stunning stranger and have breakfast at 7am wearing the crumpled yellow and green shirt.

You'd have to furrow into a nuclear and biological shelter with no TV or Internet not to be touched by the contagion. Walk into a school classroom this morning. You won't see any kids wearing uniform, everybody will be clad in Ronaldinho's t-shirt. We cut ourselves a lot of slack, we're not in the appropriate frame of mind to bother about the rise in our country risk rate. Nobody will be scolded for coming into the office late this morning, after all, bloody Korea is so many time fuses away and the body must rest after expending so much adrenalin.

Brazil doesn't have much in the way of reasons for national pride. Our politicians are insufferable, our technology achievements non-existent, our contemporary literature is bland, opaque. Our music is outstanding, that must be granted. But let's not forget that crime and poverty are rampant, driving the rich to live in terror in their intercom-powered, heavy-security golden cages. We hang on to this one belief. Soccer will deliver us from all evil.

Congratulations, Brazil, for making it into the semifinals.

Coincidence. Last night I had dinner with my friend Camilla at a Vila Madalena gay bar. I always like to unwind (read get some booze in me) after an interpreting assignment and my sluggish way home through hellish São Paulo traffic, and yesterday was one such need-to-unwind occasion. This is frequently the case when the expression "fair and thoughtful performance evaluation" comes up on a post-merger meeting.

When Camilla went to the loo (distastefully decorated with a spider and a snake to mark pissing territory for girls and boys respectively, that's Raul Seixas lesbian innuendo for you), I noticed that there was a map hanging from the wall right above our table. Further inspection revealed it was an old map of London.

Cool, I said, let me see where exactly the county of Surrey is located, because I just read Atonement and that's where the Tallis family used to live, the Tallis family being the axis around which the story revolves. To my surprise, the pictorial representation showed that Surrey is or was located just south of London, much closer to the city that I had imagined. In fact, it was just inches away from the mapmaker's name, the mapmaker's name being John Tallis.

Phrases Useful for the Workplace. Tamara sent me these oneliners over e-mail and since I am still in my translator's outfit with no blogging inspiration, I'll post them here for your enlightenment.

Thank you. We're all refreshed and challenged by your unique point of view.

The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.

I don't know what your problem is, but I'll bet it's hard to pronounce.

Any connection between your reality and mine is purely coincidental.

I have plenty of talent and vision. I just don't give a damn.

I like you. You remind me of when I was young and stupid.

What am I? Flypaper for freaks!?

I'm not being rude. You're just insignificant.

I'm already visualizing the duct tape over your mouth.

Ahhh...I see the fuck-up fairy has visited us again...

I will always cherish the initial misconceptions I had about you.

It's a thankless job, but I've got a lot of Karma to burn off.

Yes, I am an agent of Satan, but my duties are largely ceremonial.

No, my powers can only be used for good.

How about never? Is never good for you?

I'm really easy to get along with once you people learn to worship me.

You sound reasonable...Time to up my medication.

I'll try being nicer if you'll try being smarter.

I'm out of my mind, but feel free to leave a message...

I don't work here. I'm a consultant.

Who me? I just wander from room to room.

My toys! My toys! I can't do this job without my toys!

It might look like I'm doing nothing, but at the cellular level I'm really quite busy.

At least I have a positive attitude about my destructive habits.

You are validating my inherent mistrust of strangers.

I see you've set aside this special time to humiliate yourself in public.

Someday, we'll look back on this, laugh nervously and change the subject.

There may be no "I" in "team", but there are two in "idiot".

The facts, although interesting, are irrelevant.

The careful application of terror is also a form of communication.

Someone who thinks logically is a nice contrast to the real world.

I have seen the truth and it makes no sense.

Have a Latte When You're Late. So I am so late for my analysis that I will have to skip it altogether to make it to my interpreting assignment this afternoon. I might as well have some blogging and latte.

I delivered my files yesterday only to hear the staggering news that the new version is already in the pipeline. It is to be localized tout de suite as the previous version undergoes linguistic testing. It's huge, I hear. About 70k non-match words in the Help only. I guess this pretty much destroys any vague notions of taking two weeks off in July.

My new toy is called Ryze.

A sour e-mail from the Giant Jalapeno pops in the mail. He's not coming to Brazil in July or August as promised. Reason for sorrow: The weather is humid in Florida. Reason for joy: Over here the day is gorgeous and I'm wearing my favorite interpreter's outfit. A sleek gray pinstripe dress which had fallen behind a drawer two years ago and was only salvaged last week. Reason for sorrow: Sao Paulo is one huge traffic jam decorated with tall buildings on its flanks. Reason for joy: I had a yoga class this morning.

So, how's that for a balanced scorecard ?

Impressive. ProZ.com is a force to be reckoned with. Just read this trailer on the bottom of their June newsletter.

Activity at ProZ.com continues to rise steadily, with the overall number of registrations eclipsing 36,000 this month. In May, a total of 1047 jobs were passed, and 580 kudoz questions were answered per day. The ProZ.com glossaries now contain 461,635 entries.

I'm skeptical about the WWW distributed translation program and other initiatives that aim at tearing down Babel. But I believe that ProZ.com through the KudoZ system is rapidly creating a translation layer on the Web. Something I don't understand is ProZ's poor Google rating for queries "translation marketplace" and "online translation". What gives?

The ProZ staff have also introduced a new feature this month: adding rates to your profile. It's neat but scary because it can be used as a filter by the onepenny-a-word translator-seeking agencies. The good thing is that you can compare your rates to the average rates being charged in your language pair and thus find out if you're a crack whore or a prima donna and act accordingly.

Instructions to Wreck your Laptop. Take a two year old child and put her in a home office where her mom is working on a desktop and a laptop simultaneously so she doesn't have to toggle between the source text and the target text all the time.

Have the child drink a glass of water because she just came back from the park and be completely distracted with the editing, barely looking at her, even though she is gargling with the water and doing other cutesy stuff to attract your attention. Have the child squirt the full contents of her mouth directly on the laptop keyboard. Be very angry at the child because computers cost money and money doesn't grow on trees and goddamn it now you have to take this damn thing to Dell which means a trip in hectic Sao Paulo traffic.

Don't turn off the computer immediately nor turn it around to let the water drain out of the circuits because you're unaware that's the standard procedure . Instead, go to lunch at your parents and enjoy a very nice lunch with Bourgogne wine and imperial prawns and ovos nevados ao limão for dessert. In one of the polite conversation blanks, think back to the time you first acquainted yourself with the word English squirt.

After lunch, drive back home to finish your work. Marvel at the workings of the brain which cause the term sump oil with the translation óleo de cárter to be propelled with Peircian iconicity into your lips as you drive by a gas station where a car is having an oil change. Wonder where you put your mechanical dictionary.

Turn the laptop on. The keyboard will be acting dingy. Meditate on the attachment to material objects and consider your looming deadline. Mentally recalculate your financial commitments to see whether you could a afford a new one if all goes to drek. Meditate on the topic of whether or not immaterial objects can exist. Get to work with a sigh, toggle between windows with resignation.