What sites/communities keep up with things like this more actively? I’d love to read them too. Drop a link!
Readit Newsgetoj commented on Venezuela is first Andean country to lose all of its glaciers nbcnews.com/news/latino/-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
Hi! Jorge Drexler is not Venezuelan but from Uruguay [1].
I should know, I'm from there as well and he is one of our few cultural exports aside from Football.
You're right of course - I realized my mistake several hours later, but much too late to edit...
→ Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around some other glaciers
getoj commented on Venezuela is first Andean country to lose all of its glaciers nbcnews.com/news/latino/-... · Posted by u/Brajeshwar
Venezuelan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler, who grew up around these glaciers, wrote a poignant lament[1] in anticipation of this day. The gist is that at this point the only thing to do is to grieve for the world we have already lost. I don't think there's anything else to say.
Y cuando el momento llegue, honremos nuestras heridas / Celebremos la belleza que se aleja hacia otras vidas / Y aunque la pena nos hiera, que no nos desampare / Y que encontremos la manera de despedir a los glaciares
(When the moment comes, let us honor our wounds / celebrate the beauty that goes off to other lives / and although the sorrow stings, I hope it will remain / and that we find a way to say goodbye to the glaciers)
getoj commented on Komorebi: Tiling Window Management for Windows github.com/LGUG2Z/komoreb... · Posted by u/thunderbong
This is not the same thing. "Dappled light" refers to the pattern on the lit objects, while this is referring to the visible beams of light themselves a la https://live.staticflickr.com/3342/3663701610_a5f8e10d7a.jpg
I've heard people call it "sun rays" or "sun beams" in English, but it's definitely not a well defined concept.
A google image search for "木漏れ日" gets me about 50% beams and 50% patterns on the forest floor, so I don't think the difference is as clear cut as all that. But even on that basis, we then have two words--sunbeams for the beams and dappled light for the pattern--where the Japanese have only one. By the logic of the usual breathless linguistic fetishism that we see everywhere online, that means English has twice the reverence for the natural world that Japanese has.
getoj commented on Komorebi: Tiling Window Management for Windows github.com/LGUG2Z/komoreb... · Posted by u/thunderbong
Love the name. For those that are curious:
It's the Japanese word for sunlight, which is filtered through the leaves of the trees. In particular, it means the visible light rays. “Komorebi” is composed of several parts of the word: “Ko” means tree or trees. “More” means: something that comes through, something that shines through or seeps through. “Bi” means: sun or sunlight.
The word “Komorebi” reflects the romantic and emotional love of the Japanese for nature.
Allow me to be pedantic and say that English has a perfectly good two-word phrase for this exact phenomenon, "dappled light."
The internet is very big on Japonisme (not to say Orientalism) so I feel obligated to present a contrary viewpoint once in a while.
>Have you ever experienced anything for which you didn't have the words to explain?
Yes, and some of it I'm only aware because it can be easily expressed in one language but not another.
For example, "itadakimasu" in Japanese is a very simple phrase that you say when you start eating to signify appreciation for the food. It may surprise you that there is no suitable translation in English. "Thank you for the food." is awkward and strangely esoteric, "Amen." has religious implications that did not exist in "itadakimasu". "Itadakimasu" also means "to take", in this context meaning you will consume the food, but expressing that makes the English even more esoteric.
What's more, there's also "gochisou-sama", literally "Mr. Feast" (yes really), that you say when you're done eating to, again, signify appreciation for the food. "Thank you for the food." is again awkward and esoteric and doesn't fully translate the original phrase, but what's more Japanese clearly has two similar but very different concepts that cannot be adequately separated and expressed in English.
Moving away from Japanese, some languages like Spanish and French apply the concept of gender to their words and grammar. That's something completely foreign to me and I certainly can't think like that since I don't speak such languages.
The ease with which someone can conceptualize something depends significantly on their vocabulary, the language(s) they speak. If you don't know or can't speak certain words, you will naturally gravitate towards trains of thought that don't require as much complicated brain power.
Speaking more fundamentally, knowing or not knowing a language determines whether you can or can't understand someone. That difference is going to vastly change how you think about him, demonstrating once again that language affects thought.
This is why freedom of speech has become such an important human right and why it's a very good thing to learn more languages than just your native one. Speaking more languages opens your mind to more versatile trains of thought that would otherwise not be possible.
Suggesting that language doesn't affect thought is a very ignorant claim, particularly in this day and age when more people of all backgrounds desperately need to communicate more effectively with each other.
>"gochisou-sama", literally "Mr. Feast" (yes really)
Sorry to nitpick, but not really. If we're being literal it's "honorably rushing about on your horse": chisō describes the work that had do be done to prepare the feast, running here and there to gather the ingredients. The "sama" doesn't mean Mr., it's just another honorific tag like go-/o-.
getoj commented on Saint Michael Sword: Are the cathedrals really on a straight line? geospatial.netlify.app/po... · Posted by u/gh_hammour
> Certainly 7 cathedrals are too many to be a coincidence
With the number of cathedrals in Europe I don't really think this is supported.
For what it's worth (not much), the line can be extended with similar error bars to include:
- St Michael's Church in Bengaluru, India
- Gereja Katolik Santo Mikael in Surabaya, Indonesia
- St Michael's Catholic Church in Kilcoy, Australia
- St Michael's Church in Auckland, New Zealand
Perhaps the real data challenge here is to find the straight line with the most St Michael'ses globally.
getoj commented on What makes a translation great? scroll.in/article/876969/... · Posted by u/ignored
To answer what is a great translation, we first need to ask to whom it should be great.
The readers? The only thing that makes a translation great for them is whether the translated text reads well. Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care, that's why they are reading a translation!
The publishers or whoever hired the translator(s)? The most important thing for them is speed of translation, how many words per minute. Accuracy and reading well are secondary to speed. Time is money.
The translators themselves? Depending on whether these are amateurs translating out of passion or professionals translating for a living, what makes a translation great is going to be either accuracy or speed (time is money!) respectively.
Personally, speaking as a Japanese-American who has done amateur translations (anime fansubs) at one point, being a translator is terrible; the absolute worst thing about it is that the work is thankless. Whoever reads your translations simply can't appreciate quality, and if you're translating for someone for hire there are usually more pressing concerns over quality.[1]
[1]: https://www.reddit.com/r/grandorder/comments/dnpzrh/everyone...
>Whether the translation is accurate to the source material is irrelevant; the readers literally can't tell and don't care
As a professional translator, I cherish those readers. They have the good sense to trust me to do the technical part (understanding the original) and only criticize the artistic part (producing a beautiful derivative work).
The worst readers are the ones who have some knowledge of the source language, and rush to nitpick the technical decisions without considering the artistic ones. They are the literary equivalent of those "fans" who will watch a stunning film adaptation and then go home to complain about the colour of Gandalf's shoes or the width of a sand worm's molars. Ultimately, readers of this type are all ego, more concerned about being right than about whether the work is good.
The very best readers, of course, are knowledgeable in both languages and understand that "equivalence" goes far beyond what is written in the dictionary. But as you say, they don't need the translation!
getoj commented on LLMs can't do probability brainsteam.co.uk/2024/05/... · Posted by u/DrRavenstein
If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution (or at least not 99% the same number).
If you are saying that this thing can't generate random numbers on the first try then it can't generate random numbers. Which makes sense. Computers have a really hard time with random, and that's why every computer science course makes it clear that we're doing pseudo random most of the time.
>If You asked me to pick a random number between one and six and ignore all previous attempts, I would roll a die and you would get a uniform distribution
I believe what GP is getting at is that if you didn't have a die, and you truly ignored all your previous attempts to the point of genuinely forgetting that the question had been asked, then your answer would likely be the same every time. Imagine asking a person with severe Alzheimer's to pick a number, then asking again a few minutes later. You'd probably get the same answer.
Even if one only read English poems, as the author did, how about
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood, And sorry I could not travel both
“Let us go then, you and I, When the evening is spread out against the sky Like a patient etherized upon a table”