omg what is this thing
this thing is gonna kill me
Year: 2020
-
Q: How would you say “Saturdays are for the boys” in Korean?
Q: How would you say “Saturdays are for the boys” in Korean?
A: A common mistake made by translators is either trying too hard to stick to the overall structure and choice of words. They look up obscure words in the dictionary, stitch it together, and call it a day.
I disagree with this approach. Translation is not a school grammar test. Translations are made to help people understand. If it doesn’t make sense to the target audience, then that translation is garbage.
The first fallacy in approaching an expression like this is to try to stick with the “for the boys” component. That part is not too important. The important part is that people are being irresponsible and having fun (usually involving copious amounts of alcohol) because there is nothing important to do on the next day. This is also referenced in the original meme, which highlighted how Fridays are for men – here “men” being the signifier for people being responsible – and boys being used as its diametrical opposite.
The second mistake is to be unaware or unwilling to look at what context this will be used. I’ve never heard this expression before myself, so I googled it, and it was a meme that was hashtagged a few years ago. So not necessarily part of the spoken speech – more leaning towards the written internet culture, but it rolls off easy enough of the tongue that it could be, if one were cheesy enough, uttered in a moment of drunkeness on a Saturday night.
Photo: Maria Eklind (CC BY-SA) Well, this vibe definitely exists in Korean language. Let’s recreate the dialogue involving this:
– 야! 3차다 3차! 내가 치맥 쏜다 가자!
– 미쳤냐 새벽 4신데? 힘들어죽겠다..
– 불금이잖아! 달려!– Round 3, let’s go! Fried chicken and beer, I’m buying!
– Yo are you crazy man? It’s fucking 4am..
– Saturdays are for the bois, man! Who’s coming with me?There’s quite a few expressions that involve the idea of the weekend and being irresponsible drinking, and here I picked two – 불금 and 달려. Other combinations should be possible – I just picked up whatever I could think of in the moment.
I hope the idea is clear.
-
Two months ago I upgraded almost all my…
Two months ago, I upgraded almost all my computer components except for the SSD, PSU and monitors, because I was getting tired of how it was beginning to show sluggishness. I could choose to step down the heavy usage a bit, but also felt a little bit money could do the trick. One thing led to another and it ended up being a bit more than what I originally planned to do.. but we are here now.
Tonight, I pushed the computer pretty close to its limits, and satisfied to see that it still hustles around without breaking much of a sweat
- Ubuntu server running on VirtualBox to run nginx RMTP repeater that copies the livestream to both Twitch and YouTube
- OBS streaming
- a voice transcriber webapp for the livestream
- Voicemeeter (virtual sound mixer program)
- BlueStack creating a virtual instance of Android on whcih I’m running HelloTalk (a Language learning partner app)
- HelloTalk messages webapp
- WhatsApp webapp
- Hangouts Webapp
- A dozen Google Docs/Spreadsheet windows open for document cross-reference and taking notes
- A dozen WordPress tabs open in editor mode
- A dozen chrome webpage tabs open for research
- YouTube
- Slack, Signal, Discord, KakaoTalk
- A dozen File Explorer windows for design assets
- Dropbox
- Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop all open with no open documents, because they take a long time to load
-
What does “patchiness” mean in this context?
Addressing this question from HelloTalk:
What does “patchiness” mean in this passage? Is there a similar word in Spanish?
“Many ecologists now think that the relative long-term stability of climax communities comes not from diversity but from the “patchiness” of the environment; an environment that varies from place to place supports more kinds of organisms than an environment that is uniform.”
I often see people use double quotes on an expression when the writer is grasping to find a word that precisely describes the writer’s intended meanig.
- It’s possible that the word does not exist in this language, and instead of using “the word”, a flshed out out explanation must be provided instead.
- Maybe the writer just doesn’t know the word.
- The writer feels that a particular word would be a close approximation of the intended meaning, but it’s not quite there. So the writer uses the word, but puts it in double quotes to indicate that the exact intended meaning is the word plus some additional the context.
- The word that the writer is using may be a slang or generally not recognized in the specific environment as the class of word to use. (For example, if using a soccer metaphor while describing politics)
- The word that the writer picked may be something close to “private language” – something known in a close circle of friends, or a small specialized segment of the population and the writer is aware that this population does not intersect at all with the intended readership.
In this case, however, it’s easier – there is a semicolon, and the flow of the sentence shows us that what follows the semicolon is the definition of the word “patchiness” as intended by the writer. “an environment that varies from place to place”. However, interpretation of the overall sentence reveals a contradiction, which is puzzling:
A. Ecologists think that stability comes from “patchiness”, not from diversity
B. An environment has “patchiness” when it varies from place to place. An environment that has patchiness is not uniform.
Isn’t the concept of an environment that varies from place to place (B) very close to the idea of a diverse environment(A)? What’s going on here?
Maybe the writer is trying to differentiate between what we would usually imagine when we think environmental diversity (just things being different and varied all over the place) with “patchiness” – possibly the overall environment having multiple, smaller areas within – these smaller areas are uniform internally, but each area is different from other areas. This concept also nicely aligns with the visual image of patches of cloth. You have worn jeans, and patch it up with a square piece of cloth. Now imagine a jean made up with many patched pieces of cloth..
I can also think of another concept that is similar to this – when people describe urban landscapes, an interesting concept is the idea of “microneighborhoods” – the idea that there are neighborhoods, just a couple blocks wide, each being pretty homogenous within each microneighborhood, but wildly shifting in demographic makeup, architecture, and mood when moving to another nearby microneighborhood.
