computer ramblings
Apr. 24th, 2004 12:16 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dchenesI fought my way through four pages of that paper yesterday, and it's still giving me problems. I think I'm trying to hold myself to an impossible standard, and I should just write the thing and stop obsessing over it. This is the paper which counts for 50% of an undergrad's grade, but I'm not an undergrad, so it only counts for 30%. In happier news, however, my written grammar is getting better.
Now if somebody would kindly go and invent a function of MS Word that allowed me US English formatting and French language editing at the same time, life would be splendid. When I set Word for French, it insists on putting spaces before colons and semicolons and using French quotation marks. If I set it for English, it goes insane because the French dictionary disappears and it spends all its time pointing out what it thinks are spelling mistakes. This wouldn't be a problem at all if my secondary sources weren't in English, so I have to keep switching languages back and forth. "Oh, come on now, 'understand' is a perfectly good word, what do you mean you can't spell it...oh. Right." So I go and switch languages for the duration of the quote, and it's happy again, and then I have to switch it back to French. Interestingly enough, when I switch languages, it doesn't switch formats, so I wind up with English quotes in French formatting, which it doesn't like either. Microsoft obviously didn't consider the possibility of bilingual documents when they wrote this stuff.
If I had more money than sense, I'd hire a bunch of coders and start a software company for translators. I've been playing with this idea ever since I've been swearing at MultiTerm. Trados is a pretty nifty program, but I can't believe how counter-intuitive some of it is. It runs crankily on Windows XP and doesn't run at all on Macs. (I don't know if it would run under Virtual PC on a Mac, since I don't have $600 to spend buying Trados to find out. I bet it wouldn't, though. It seems to require a dongle.) What I want is a Mac-platform translation program that plays nice with the Mac-platform desktop publishing software that already exists. I know that PCs can read files zipped on a Mac, so why not have the translation and DTP software on the same platform? Then you could zip it, send it to a PC-based client who would then unzip it, and life would be lovely.
Oh, and I really want a translation program that doesn't play hell with apostrophes and accent marks. I'm getting thoroughly sick of needing three keystrokes for one apostrophe. If I want to type "d'un" I have to type D-'-'-backspace-U-N. Otherwise I get "dùn" if I use one apostrophe, or "d''un" if I don't delete one. It also works that way in English. "isn't" has to be I-S-N-'-'-backspace-T, or otherwise it's "isnt" or "isn''t". Whose brilliant idea was that? I think it may have something to do with the fact that the guys who wrote Trados in the first place were working primarily in English and German, and as far as I know, German doesn't use apostrophes. I can't explain why they left the English that way, though.
OK, I shut up now.
Now if somebody would kindly go and invent a function of MS Word that allowed me US English formatting and French language editing at the same time, life would be splendid. When I set Word for French, it insists on putting spaces before colons and semicolons and using French quotation marks. If I set it for English, it goes insane because the French dictionary disappears and it spends all its time pointing out what it thinks are spelling mistakes. This wouldn't be a problem at all if my secondary sources weren't in English, so I have to keep switching languages back and forth. "Oh, come on now, 'understand' is a perfectly good word, what do you mean you can't spell it...oh. Right." So I go and switch languages for the duration of the quote, and it's happy again, and then I have to switch it back to French. Interestingly enough, when I switch languages, it doesn't switch formats, so I wind up with English quotes in French formatting, which it doesn't like either. Microsoft obviously didn't consider the possibility of bilingual documents when they wrote this stuff.
If I had more money than sense, I'd hire a bunch of coders and start a software company for translators. I've been playing with this idea ever since I've been swearing at MultiTerm. Trados is a pretty nifty program, but I can't believe how counter-intuitive some of it is. It runs crankily on Windows XP and doesn't run at all on Macs. (I don't know if it would run under Virtual PC on a Mac, since I don't have $600 to spend buying Trados to find out. I bet it wouldn't, though. It seems to require a dongle.) What I want is a Mac-platform translation program that plays nice with the Mac-platform desktop publishing software that already exists. I know that PCs can read files zipped on a Mac, so why not have the translation and DTP software on the same platform? Then you could zip it, send it to a PC-based client who would then unzip it, and life would be lovely.
Oh, and I really want a translation program that doesn't play hell with apostrophes and accent marks. I'm getting thoroughly sick of needing three keystrokes for one apostrophe. If I want to type "d'un" I have to type D-'-'-backspace-U-N. Otherwise I get "dùn" if I use one apostrophe, or "d''un" if I don't delete one. It also works that way in English. "isn't" has to be I-S-N-'-'-backspace-T, or otherwise it's "isnt" or "isn''t". Whose brilliant idea was that? I think it may have something to do with the fact that the guys who wrote Trados in the first place were working primarily in English and German, and as far as I know, German doesn't use apostrophes. I can't explain why they left the English that way, though.
OK, I shut up now.
