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You might have heard about the restaurant in China that, in preparation for the Olympics, decided to translate their name into English. I guess the translation program was down and, well …
Here’s a picture from tenz1225’s photostream.
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Conceivably Related PostsAn Essay on TranslationI’m posting this again because, when I linked to it before, a few weeks [...]

News flash!
rules grammar change (onion audio)
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Conceivably Related PostsSeven rules for winning a MacArthurTo see your genius rewarded, follow these seven guidelines.

Bottom line: “All the rules suggest t…Testing Goodwidgets Photo StackI coughed up my two bucks for the pro version of GoodWidget (Stack), and it works great, except I th…Avante-garde frustration

The British Library is hosting [...]

Google Blogoscoped has translated several Garfield strips into Chinese and back again using Google Translate.

Here’s the text, in case the strip is hard to read at this size.
Jon: Garfield, I retrieved a pair of slippers
Garfield: I am sorry, the cat is not worth a pair of slippers
Garfield: I will, however, capture extract
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Conceivably Related PostsDrum MachineGenerally [...]

Here’s a fun little game from Language Trainers Group. Listen to people read a passage from “If” by Rudyard Kipling, than guess where they are from.
I scored 31. Is that good or bad?
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Conceivably Related PostsEnd of month companion sites round-upI’ve been a little under the weather, and I haven’t been able to keep up very [...]

Machine translation: there’s nothing like it.
Enjoy this short video with babelfished dialogue.

Conceivably Related PostsKontrapunkt typefaceMost free typefaces are worth about what you pay for them. But the Danish design firm Kontrapunkt (I…Google SetsSomehow I seem to have missed the news about Google Sets. Google Sets are G’s way of categorizing th…Free Vista FontsIf you have [...]

I wrote yesterday about a word that was misspelled by thirteen out of fourteen experienced editors. Here are two words from the test that were each missed by ten of the editors. The second one is a little surprising; at least, I consider it a basic word that any editor should know.
Pick the spelling preferred [...]

It means “to dry; to preserve by drying.”
I’m hiring a temporary replacement editor for a colleague who will be out several months on a medical leave. I got a lot of very qualified applicants. To whittle them down I produced a test of 85 objective questions. I tested the top 14 candidates, all with sterling [...]

The reader, Bradley LaShawn Fowler, is suing two Bible publishers (Thomas Nelson and Zondervan), alleging that the translators erroneously rendered a passage resulting in a false suggestion that it condemns homosexuality.
At issue is I Corinithians 6:9, and whether two Greek terms allude to homosexuality or prostitution or something else. (The King James version of the [...]

Some pretty porous copy on this text panel about porous paving at the National Botanical Gardens near the capitol building in Washington, DC. (Official, nonpartisan, federal government-approved typos.)
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Conceivably Related PostsSave Desuetude …The Save Desuetude movement starts here.

How could the sentence “We’d be no poorer if desuetude, …Scene of the crime

Victim and perp: broken ankle and [...]

Sybil was the pseudonym of a woman whose story was told in a popular book and movie of the 1970s. She supposedly had sixteen distinct personalities. Now, studies suggest that bilingual speakers may exhibit different personalities for each of their languages.
That’s simplifying more than a bit. At Language Log Mark Liberman, in a careful, detailed, [...]

Literacy is addictive. Once you start reading you don’t go back. But what happens when you’re not allowed to read?
I went to see an ophthalmologist about some trouble I developed in one of my eyes — large dark floaters looking something like the image from Two Days in Paris (in which Julie Delpy has trouble [...]

Oxford University Press has placed the data from its World Atlas of Language Structures online. There’s some interesting information here. Following are some examples.
The map below shows this distribution of various arrangements of objects and verbs, and adjectives and nouns.

We can zoom in on the map to see how English relates to other European languages [...]

A study by the University of Arizona has reported surprising results when testing native French speakers on the gender of nouns. Across the board, the French speakers showed less agreement about gender than expected, but this was particularly true of younger subjects — this suggests that gender is becoming more flexible (the young subjects did [...]

Most posts at Right Reading are published at 5:00 am Pacific Time. But this one will run at 11:59 the night before. I wouldn’t want to be a day late in wishing the punctilious Henry Fowler a happy 150th.
Fowler is, of course, the author of Modern English Usage, which is still among the best editor’s [...]

Fake memoirs are in the news again, with the usual hand wringing. No need to go into the details, which have been thoroughly reported. Instead, let’s think about what might make book editors so gullible.
Book editors are a peculiar mixture of optimism and cynicism. They begin as idealistic literature enthusiasts — they probably start with [...]

RightReading would not ordinarily post an institution’s capital campaign video, but the presentation below by Richard E. Miller, Chair of the English department at Rutgers University raises some interesting issues (after the first minute and a half of departmental promotion, which can safely be skipped). The video was produced by Miller with videography provided by [...]

WORDSMITHING: The process of going through a document and making sure the best possible word is used in all circumstances. — ww.lewiswritingservices.com/glossary.htm

If there is one word I would like to ban permanently it’s wordsmithing. In my day job there is someone who likes to say “Give it to Tom for wordsmithing.” The implication, to [...]

Sound Comparisons is one of those sites that makes you think there just might be something to this internet business. It contains recordings of a variety of words — naked, shown above, is just one — in several English dialects, as well as in related Germanic languages. By hovering your mouse over one of the [...]

At a camping store:
NOW IS THE WINTER OF OUR DISCOUNT TENTS
Conceivably Related PostsRoyal Futura

Most discussion of type in film centers on anachronisms — how could characters in a movie set i…Invading LiechtensteinOn March 2 170 lost Swiss soldiers accidentally invaded neighboring Liechtenstein. But instead of cl…

Recently there has been an uptick in talk about semicolons. Witness:

Hooray for the ;
I say! A subterranean semicolon!
FANBOYS and the Semicolon
Colbert on punctuation
How to Use Punctuation Correctly
Punctuation lives
The Elements of Spam
Semicolonoscopy

What does this signify? I’m not sure. Could it be another sign of the trend to the literate class becoming a cultural elite, eager to [...]