pushing a camel through the eye of a needle and other pursuits

[dchenes]

Urgh. I win, maybe. I just spent what feels like several hours (but wasn't even one) tracking down a term. Usually, it's easy; the French has a direct, or mostly direct, English translation. This one doesn't quite, and also has a spelling quirk that sent me off down the wrong path for quite a while. The term in French is "signes séquellaires", the English translation of which, in context, is "sequelae". (I hate it when the English equivalent of a French term is in Latin.)


Usually words in French that end in -aire are directly translated as English words that end in -ar or -ary. So I went insane trying to find some variation on sequellar/sequelar/sequellary/sequelary, and discovered that "sequelary" is as close as I was going to get (and only showed up in Google once). Fine, says I, there must be a different translation for it. In context, it could mean "subsequent", except that as it turns out, "subséquent" is a perfectly good French word (I knew that), so never mind. I plugged "séquellaire" into every online French or French-English dictionary I could find, and came up with exactly nothing that worked, although I did come up with one that suggested "sequela" (in English) as what I meant. It wasn't, at the time, but since I didn't know what it meant, I looked it up in the Grand Dictionnaire. Lo and behold, it was what I meant, except there's no way to work "sign" into it in English. I knocked "sign" off the English and discovered that the sentence still makes sense, so the French text is repeating itself, or inventing terms it didn't need to invent. At this point, "signes séquellaires" translates as "sequela", but I can't prove it in context. Back to Google, hunt for context, discover that most of the time the English term is used in the plural, which makes it "sequelae". Halleluia. Lunchtime.


If anybody ever gets around to re-inventing or expanding Google, I wish they'd include a wildcard function. Granted, that would mean you have to slog through a lot more results, most of which aren't what you meant, but it would be tremendously useful to be able to plug in the parts of a phrase before and after the word I want, and somehow get Google to recognize that I want all of those words in that order, but with one or two words in the middle. Sometimes, but not often, that works if I put the before section and the after section in quotation marks and search for that. Usually it finds the first part, and then finds the second part halfway down the page someplace.

I also got another three hours or so of work in on the glossary, except I didn't do what I went there for in the first place. I meant to take all the rest of the terms I proved while I was translating and put them in the glossary. What I really ought to do is take all the highlighted terms out of my translations, put them in a separate list, compare that with the glossary I've already got, and see how much more work I have to do on it. I only need about 60 terms for the purposes of the case study, but one of my articles is so technical that if I'm being sufficiently thorough with both articles, I'll probably end up with 100 terms or so. Methinks I ought to ask about that.

This is why I need to be an amoeba. Having arguments like that with terminology burns my brain out fairly badly, and I should use every spare minute I've got on weekdays looking for an apartment and applying for jobs, but with only one brain I can't do that.

It feels like it should be Friday, but it's felt like that since yesterday, so if you ask me what day it is, I'd probably say April.

Comments

[scirocco.livejournal.com]

Actually, google seems to take "*" as a wildcard. I put in "Do your *" and it came up with searches for "Do your worst", "DO your best", and "Do your Own", just to start with.

[dchenes.livejournal.com]

Well, ain't that slick! It does work, but it depends on what you're looking for. I tried it with "inferior * nucleus", looking for it to give me "inferior olivary nucleus". It did, but it gave me several pages of "inferior nucleus" first. I guess if the words on either side of the missing one can go together with nothing in the middle, it gives you those results first.

[siercia]

They may also support NEAR and THEN searches, which are fairly standard boolean search terms. Theoretically your "word * word" search could find results like "word babble babble babble babble word" while "word NEAR 2 word" would find only instances of the words within 2 words of each other (in any order) and "word THEN 2 word would find only instances of the words within 2 words of each other (in the order given). You can usually use any number with either term.