Philips recently had a Simplicity event, where they showcased a number of concept products that may or may not make it into the real world in the future.
To go along with the event, Philips also setup a voting board for a number of discussion topics. One of the topics currently under discussion is whether e-books are a good idea. You can pick a side and argue out your position or vote on the arguments of others.
Caroline McCarthy has gone to Wired’s Caroline McCarthy has gone to Wired’s (for CNet’s News.com) and, apparently, saw only flashy cool products, that ultimately will not be useful.
I was at the same show and my feeling were completely opposite.
I saw robotic seals that are used in Japan for therapeutic purposes. I saw an interactive robot that was encouraging kids to persevere with speech therapy. I even saw the LifeStraw, a device that allows to save lives by purifying water at a cost of 5$ per year?
I always feel impressed by translators. Recently, I have finished reading the english translation of NightWatch and it was very well done. I have read the russian original a number of times and could not see how a translation could make it justice. Yet it did and did it well. Congratulations to Andrew Bromfield on that one.
Today (30th of September) is an International Translation Day. I want to say a delayed thank-you to those people who allowed me to read Pippi Longstocking, The Three Musketeers and Don Quixote de la Mancha in my native Russian by translating those works from Swedish, French and Spanish correspondingly.
Roger Shuy describes the original goals of American Association of Applied Linguistics and progress (or in his opinion) retreat from those goals that happened over the last 30 years.
I started to write a comment on it, but realised that it needs fine-tuning. So, I will skip my thinking for now, apart from saying that he has a very valid point. Ether way, the article is worth a read.
If you speak more than one language and have a blog, join the Carnival of Blog Translation.
I am not a translator, but I do speak (and write) English and Russian. I will be participating. The next step is to figure out whether I should do it from Russian into English or from English into Russian. Maybe I can even do both. Certainly a translation practice could not go astray.