Links

These links come with lots of claims but no guarantees. I do try to check every so often to sort out the dead ones.

July 29, Year 3: The theater links section outgrew its space; I pulled those items into a new file. Click here to visit a separate page containing links that have to do with plays and productions.

Use the list below to navigate through this links page: Just click on a topic.

  • Entrancing web sites
  • Translation and translators
    • You can do the syllogism yourself: Major premise, all kinds of people create blogs. Minor premise, translators are all kinds of people. Conclusion, translators write some of the wildest, widest-ranging blogs around.
      • Margaret Marks, a British lawyer working as a freelance translator in Fürth, Germany, writes and collects articles on legal translation between German and English . . . though you'll see her church is more wide than high. The scope of "Transblawg" will make your head spin. I know Margaret from FLEFO, a Compuserve forum established for language teachers but hijacked by translators back around 1980. Among those of other forum veterans, she recommends blogs titled "Carob" and "Working Languages" and includes links to them and dozens of others.
      • Translation in the Trenches is still visible though moribund. It was an above-average blog, but the last entry dates from about June 2005.
    • Jost Zetzsche published the Translator's Tool Box a couple of years ago and brought out a revised edition in 2004. It's an ebook containing lots of highly specific information on utilities (to help you adjust Windows to work your way, edit your HTML files, etc.) and techniques for getting better performance out of your heavy-duty specialist software. Jost issues a series of email "Tool Kit" newsletters too. The logo here will link you to his web site; be sure your popup blocker is disabled when you click.
      (The Tool Box would have been a good bargain if all it did was help me find Ultra Edit, a fine editor for HTML and other files.)
    • The American Translators Association (ATA), biggest society of translators and interpreters in the U.S., offers information for novice and veteran translators, organizes regional, national and special-topic conferences, and maintains an amazing online Translation Services Directory. The next national conference is set for October 13-16, Year 4, in Toronto.
    • I've added links to ATA chapters and affiliates at the end of this section (click here if you just can't wait to see them).
    • The Translator's Home Companion site will take some re-exploration. The site went a number of years without updating but has been taken over, newly sponsored, and expanded. On first examination I find a vast directory of online dictionaries and glossaries plus many links to other tools.
    • Nicholas Hartmann, a translator specializing in patents (French, German and Italian to English), is also a distinguished photographer.
    • A lot of other translators and translation service companies have business web sites too. I'll add the best of them as I locate them; for others, you can browse the ATA directory at the link above.
    • Erich Brandenberger runs ITLA, a translation service in Zürich, and has recently been putting some good material on his web site. Some has to do with his company's business, but some is pretty personal (and Erich is a man of strong views). Visit the ITLA site and note the graphic thingie near the upper left. Click "E" for English-language pages or "D" for German-language ones; "H" takes you home, and >> advances you from page to page. If you start at the home page and press << instead, you get into Erich's sometimes startling questions and reflections. Worth a good look.
    • The European Union has a big index of translation services available online. Like most everything having to do with the EU, it used to be all right but now has become bloated and hard to use. ("And in what way is that our problem?" I hear you saying. Point taken.)
    • Here are links to some of the American Translators Association's regional chapters and affiliates. To spare my carpal tunnels, I've abbreviated Association as A, Interpreters as I, Translators as T, Chapter as C, and used NESW for North(ern) and so forth.
  • Theater, including amateur theater
    Click here to visit my theater links page.
  • Search engines and utilities
    • Start out by looking at Fran's web site. She maintains a monster links page, though mainly without amusing commentary. Fran is also the Number One source for literary and assorted theater links.
    • As far as I know, only one WWW search engine has become a German verb (ergoogeln, honest). Some tips for using Google in the most satisfying way:
      • De minimis non curat Google. Don't bother to include words like of, and, the. Capitalization doesn't count.
      • Think before you type in the search box. Looking (as so many are) for something about elf sex in The Lord of the Rings? Consider how many instances of elf sex you are likely to find anywhere else! You can simply put in "elf sex" (with the quotes) and get exactly the same results with less typing. [Note added April 7, Year 3: Bad example. It turns out there are lots and lots of elf sex sites, and while many of them refer to Tolkien there definitely are others. I'll try to think of a better illustration.]
      • If it's pix you want, Google Images has a big database but it's dismally out of date. My suggestion is to open the Google home page and include the word "images" or "photos" in your search string.
      • There's a pretty good book called Google Hacks with a hundred suggestions for boosting Google performance. It will be worthwhile if you're a regular user of the search engine or if you run a web site and want to gain more Google hits.
    • Stammtisch Beau Fleuve has the most astounding glossary of . . . well, you look at it and fill in the rest.
    • I'm learning to use an economical but fairly strong computer-aided design program called CAD Standard. It produces two-dimensional drawings that I use for designing theater sets. The publisher offers a free version without some useful features, or you can spring for forty or fifty bucks and get the fully enabled release. Click here to learn more about Cad Standard.
    • My favorite text editor is Ultra Edit, which works in a fast, easy-to-understand way. Features include searching over multiple files, a copy of the HTML Tidy utility, and edit modes for everything from plain text to hex. You can even configure the program so that when you place the cursor on a left parenthesis character, the other half of the pair lights up. This is a very fine program for not very much money.
  • Soap opera recaps
  • A pirate link
    • This seems like a good idea: International Talk Like a Pirate Day, September 19. The site includes an English to Pirate Translator and tells how to observe TLAP Day in your town. The FAQs page will clear up all doubts (and Cap'n Nigel's too). Mark your calendar, me 'earty!
  • What a wonderful world
    • I try to visit the Double-Tongued Dictionary a few times a week. Creator Grant Barrett intends the site as a documented collection of items from the "fringe" of the English language. While not every word has a definition yet, nothing gets a full entry without a source citation (just like the OED). The site is growing rapidly.
    • The National Museum of Natural History, a unit of the Smithsonian Institution, has a really impressive Paleo Art site with first-rate scientific illustrations of animals and plants reconstructed from fossils. In addition to the images (which I think display at pretty nearly 100% scale, i.e., as big as they would have appeared in books), there is an 11-page guide to scientific illustration techniques and a guide to the preservation of these wonderful documents. This one almost made it into "hypnotic web sites." Fine stuff.
    • Fan fiction category: The Thursday Next site has many features related to the Jasper Fforde novels about the LiteraTec and SpecialOps-13. What I can't figure is how the first book in the series, The Eyre Affair, escaped getting classified as alternate-universe science fiction. Maybe it's because it contains references to literature outside the fan realm. (Some of them are a bit obscure: Why does a pub called the Cheshire Cat offer all drinks for 52.5 pence during happy hour?) I started behind the rest of the class, just heard Fforde on NPR talking about Miss Next, and my catchup effort had to begin with a reading of Jane Eyre itself, so I'm two novels shy of real follower status. But I enjoyed the web site, which includes Pickwick's Cavalcade of Fun and a Swindon photo album. You may like to turn off your pop-up preventer while viewing it; some of the funny items act just like those noxious ads.
    • Brian Little, president of Stage Net, Inc., is a theater professional and entrepreneur whose website at stagenetart.com, as he describes it, "presents art that nourishes the spirit for your home and computer. You can also have Stage Net design a custom screensaver that is licensed for you to sell or use for promotional purposes. The website has a gallery with a secure online shopping cart system." Tell Brian I said hi; he's given me some excellent information.
    • My nephew Joe runs a site called "Cave of Shadows." Now a high school senior, Joe has strong opinions.
    • Life, the Universe and Everything: h2g2 began among fans of The Hitch-Hiker's Guide to the Galaxy in the late 1990s. As part of a program to extend its jurisdiction and become indispensable to a satellite- and MP3-minded public, the British Broadcasting Corporation took over as host of the site. It now bills itself as "The Earth Edition of" and so forth and includes instructive and diverting articles, reviews and discussion groups. And no advertising. I've just begun to explore the site; click here to join me. You may want to register as an h2g2 Researcher and get a keen little icon for your web page.
    • A recent publication from ESRI, a firm that produces geographic information systems (GIS) software, reported that the Central African country of Gabon has set aside a tenth of its land area in national parks. Much of the land was about to be lumbered off, but a "Save the Congo" fundraising campaign and some special contributions ($36 million from the U.S. government, for example) enabled the nation to buy back the timber rights. Gabon's 13 new national parks encompass seacoast, river valley and deep forest. Have a look at the ESRI story by clicking here. You may also enjoy visiting Gabon's site and reading about the remarkable variety of living things to be found there. Besides the Gabonese and American governments and ESRI, contributions of money, knowledge, publicity and impetus came from the Yaounde Declaration countries of the Congo Basin, the National Geographic Society and the Wildlife Conservation Society (click here to visit that site if you have the patience to wait for it to load).
    • Not one but three, no, four French Foreign Legion sites, if that takes your fancy:
    • For a good time click here to set your watch against the federal government's atomic clock.
    • This world clock tells you the current time, pretty near, in 131 places around the world. Right now it's 10:33 p.m. on Tuesday in Riyadh, for example.
    • Links to innumerable word-lovers' sites. These include dictionaries, pages maintained by people like Richard Lederer, and so forth—not just shlubs who are crowing because they found "windfucker" in the big dictionary (it's the name of a sea bird).
    • For those of mildly ingrown sensibilities, Pendemonium sells pens, ink, paper and so forth. A useful site (and what I've bought from them has come up to the claims they made).
    • The Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP) publishes a magazine, The Skeptical Inquirer, and carries on propaganda for scientific inquiry and against creationism and other deviations.
  
Approved
Ben Teague
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