Ordinary Nothing

Some ad companies think they can get better results by targeting the ads to the viewers. Some strategies are matching the ad with the viewed page, while others try to target the audience in different ways, based on location or language. Which makes sense.

One problem is finding the country of origin of the viewer. Most companies seem to have solved that by pretty accurate geotargeting. Though some, of course, are still stumbling in the dark. For example, as a Jew living in Israel, I still occasionally get ads for Muslim dating sites. Or for various deals which are only relevant to US residents. But these are becoming more rare.

When they do detect a location, the basic step is only to show ads relevant to people from that location. That’s the basic step, which most have been doing (or trying to do) for a while.

These ads often don’t only change content, but language as well. If the advertised product is sold internationally, people from different countries may pay more attention to ads in their own language^[1].

One way to do it is to have a set of pre-made ads, and show them according to the location.

Another way, for those wanting to be more… efficient? is to have a single ad, with several localized text strings that can change inside this ad according to the source.

In theory, it’s nice. There is a need to keep only one copy of a picture, or interactive program, and yet still someone from the US will see English, and someone from, say, France, will see French. The main needed investment is to get the text lines translated into the relevant languages.

And then you have those that go the extra mile (backwards, usually, though) and pick languages that are harder to handle. They do the whole design with languages that go left to right, like English, and then put in right-to-left text, like Hebrew or Arabic.

In many of those cases that I saw, they then forget that the text has to be added to the pictures a little differently. And they don’t bother to show the finished result (calculated ad with the language) to someone who knows the language. They probably just verify the initial text strings, thinking that nothing can go wrong since the same exact text will go into the image.

The end result? Extremely unprofessional advertising, when all the words in the text, or even the whole sentence, go backward, letter by letter. ( !stoidi diputS )

Like this image taken from an ad I saw on several websites. It was on a page together with at least one more different ad, by the same advertiser, that contained the exact same problem.

Did I mention that it looks extremely unprofessional, silly, and pathetic? Because, well, it does. And it definitely gets you thinking that if they managed to screw the ads so bad, on something so basic, what else didn’t they bother to pay attention to, and was it important?

So, the advertising company (the one putting the ads, I don’t know who designed them) is fastclick.net , which redirects to ValueClick Media. Nice name, not so much value to the advertiser.

I thought I’d be nice, and let them know. So I went to their site, got the Contact page, and looked for an email address, or a form. No email address, but there is a contact form. A contact form where the required fields include things like phone number, company, location, how I heard about them, and so on.

This may be alright (OK, not really) for people who are potential customers. But for someone who just wants to do them a favour by dropping a quick helpful note? Completely unacceptable. I shouldn’t have to work, and provide lots of details, just to try and help them.

Required fields should be the message content, and a quick subject. Maybe not even the quick subject. Asking for email address is also fine, if the message may need a follow-up, but that should be left to the discretion of the person sending the message.

And this company is supposed to make money by selling things to people?! By marketing?! That’s supposed to be their strong side? Funny.

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1. Personally it annoys me, and I always feel more comfortable when it’s English, rather than Hebrew or other language, if I read on a computer, but I’m really not representative here[back]

Some people have a hard time understanding the concept of a gift, or free. This usually happens in marketing and sales departments.

Case in point, this latest special offer from my credit card company. I saw these images (in Hebrew) today, and both are for the same offer. The first comes from their website and the second from an email they sent.

The large line happily informs their customers that they’re getting 50 ILS as a gift.

The smaller line below it clarifies that the gift can be obtained in exchange for 2,000 points.

These points are a standard credit card deal. You buy stuff with the card, you get points/stars/whatever. And you can get discounts and special^[1] offers in exchange for these points.

So now they have a special deal, where you can buy something else with those points. A gift. That’s right, you can pay them to give you a gift.

Someone should buy them a gift - a dictionary.

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1. usually so special as to be entirely unworthwhile, but that may just be me. Still, this offer right here comes to 0.025 ILS per point, and that’s actually a good rate. After years of using the card I think I’m not even at 10,000 points. You get the drift[back]

The correct abbreviation for shekels, the New Israeli Shekel included, is ILS.

Yes, that’s ILS. Not NIS. Even if NIS seems like a much better acronym for New Israeli Shekel. NIS is neat, it fits, it makes sense, but it has the single disadvantage of not being correct.

ILS was the code for the old Israeli Shekel, and it still is the code for the New Israeli Shekel. Prices are in ILS, not in NIS.

No international bank will offer to exchange any currency for NIS, or will have a clue about the exchange rate. But they will be happy to exchange your ILS.

And the prices you see on those online stores? In ILS, not in NIS.

Please, please, please, stop putting NIS after every time you write to me a price of something in English. It drives me mad. I don’t care that most Israelis will understand what it means. I don’t even care (well, I’m saddened by it) that more Israelis will understand what you mean by NIS than what you mean by ILS. It’s just not the currency code.

This rant was intended as a public service for Israeli readers, and for myself. I expect anyone else on the world who has a reason to use Shekels will know that the currency code for Shekels is ILS and not NIS. It’s just most of the locals here who insist on sticking with this pesky NIS abomination. And as I wrote above, it drives me mad. Thank you for your attention.

Shipped packages and crates can carry all sorts of warning labels on them. The most common ones seen being “Breakable”, “Do not fold”, and their ilk.

Today I noticed a new one on a large package delivered to our office.

In very large block letters, with a colour highlight, was the sentence “DO NOT FREEZE”, and beneath it, in slightly smaller font “Sensitive Against Freeze”.

I had no idea shipping companies had a tendency to freeze packages.

Very strange.

Not to mention pretty bad grammar on the smaller sentence, but that’s beside the point.

The last ones left a few months ago. This starts to feel like a recurring theme, the companies in nearby buildings are stationary, but the people trying to get the upper floors in our own building never stick for long.

The last ones were quiet, and we had little interaction with them. But the newcomers give a first impression that remind me more of the ones we had before.

They came around with the landlord, as he was showing them around the place. And no, I’m not sure what reason is there to show someone around after they already closed the deal. Presumably they got to see what they’re renting before that.

They were quite an odd looking pair (even number of odd people is a lousy pun, isn’t it?).

My boss asked the one that seemed in charge what business are they in.

Stocks.

Informative, and highly descriptive. So my boss asked for a few more details, trying to understand just what will we be getting.

Oh, you know, all sorts of stuff. Like, err, toys. Or computers. Stocks. All sorts of stuff.

So my boss further asked if they’re just using the space for storage, or will there be an office there. And if they’re importing merchandise, or doing something else?

The guys said that he’ll be there personally in an office as well. And that’s it’s not an import business, it’s “stocks”. Consisting of “Toys, all sorts of stuff, computers, whatever”.

The exact word he used, all this time, was “stockim”, with the “im” being a Hebrew suffix for plural, like the “s” in English. Normally when a Hebrew word exists people use it. Such a form of the English noun with a Hebrew suffix is only used when the word is one for which there isn’t yet a Hebrew word, or it’s a very uncommon word.

Stocks, if it’s not obvious, is a word for which there are a few perfectly suitable, and well used, Hebrew equivalents. So even if it wasn’t clear from the guy’s demeanour and attitude, it was obvious he wasn’t exactly talking about moving regular stocks, but usings “stocks” as a codeword for something else…

Oh, well, at least this time they didn’t get parking rights, so we won’t have to share the limited parking lot of the building. Still, looks like we’re going to have some good high-quality legal company again.

This first link contains screenshots from a DVD of Star Wars: Episode III. Except that this is the version which was translated and dubbed to Chinese, showing English subtitles.

The subtitles’ English was translated back from the spoken Chinese, after the dubbing.

And the results are hilarious. Some of the lines are very amusing even if you never saw the movie, or any movie in the Star Wars series.

The other two links include pictures of Chinese restaurants’ menus. Including the translated names of all the dishes and courses in English.

Some are just plain bizarre, and some are terribly funny.

I just hope official documents and international agreements are translated better than that…

Search engines are a pretty hot topic on-line. The big companies keep adding services and features. And new ones keep popping all the time, trying to present new features and techniques in order to get a piece of the market.

And they all get coverage in the news, or do their own press releases.

A couple of those I saw recently had some terminology problems that really irked me, though. I know, I know, reading something about a search engine, and being mostly bothered about a few wrong words is petty. But still.

The first one was a report on Exalead. I’ve played a bit with Exalead beta in the past (Like many other online services these days it has been in beta stage for a long time), and overall it’s pretty nice. It has some nice features and interface ideas, but it does have its quirks and problems as well.

The part that bothered me in the article (well, the terminological issue, anyway. There were a few other article parts I didn’t exactly agree with and that felt more like hype than an actual reporting or review) though, wasn’t in something about Exalead itself. It was in this paragraph describing the competition:

Bourdoncle’s ambition is to crack the top five in Web search, which is now led by Google, followed by Yahoo, Microsoft, Time Warner and Ask.

Everyone heard of Google. And yes, Yahoo is pretty big in search as well, and doing a good job at it. Microsoft has also added some changes and improvement, and are working on getting better search result. And Ask too have increased features and made significant advances, moving from what was once a rather sad search engine to one that seems to have a good chance of gaining a higher position in the top five.

But Time Warner? That made me stop in my tracks reading it. Time Warner have a search engine?! Since when? What are they talking about? Heck, I know and have heard of quite a lot of small, even tiny, search engines, and yet never heard of any Time Warner one. No way it became one of the big five.

And then it hit me. AOL. The guy who wrote that article, Dan Farber is someone with a lot of experiene in the field, and should really know better. Yet he decided that due to the AOL - Time Warner merger it would be correct to refer to AOL’s search engine as Time Warner.

The search engine is AOL. Not Time Warner. Referring to it as Time Warner shows a stunning lack of understanding, and a total lack of connection to anything going on in the search area. I really do hope that this wasn’t in the original post, but was maybe changed by some idiotic marketing guy who is in charge of “correcting” their posts before publishing (Though such a practice is a problem all by itself).

But regardless of how it got there, the second I saw something like that on the article it immediately made everything else there suspect. A reader can’t be expect to trust anything appearing on an article by someone who broadcasts so loudly that he doesn’t have a clue. If he’s capable of referring to Time Warner as a big search engine (and never mind that AOL’s search engine isn’t particularly good, it is big at least) then he’s clueless.

The second case is from a post by Yahoo, about them releasing the Yahoo Answers service from beta.

This post is on Yahoo’s search blog, where supposedly people actually have a clue about search.

And they also provide a link for adding their Yahoo Answers as a search engine in the Firefox browser. There are two problems with that link, however.

The first is a purely technical one. It doesn’t point to a place which adds their Yahoo Answers service as a search engine in Firefox. Instead it directs to the general page for adding search engines to the search bar in Firefox. If someone wants to they can search for the Yahoo Answers there and add it, but that’s not what the idea of linking to adding the search engines is supposed to be. Nor do they explain near the link that people following it will have to go on searching for it manually. Currently there’s a second link from the main page, but that varies, and can change…

The second one is the terminology item which again gave me a start. They referred to the link as one to add Yahoo Answers as a search repository in Firefox. Yes, that’s right, not a search engine, but a search repository.

I have no idea what a search repository is (Someplace where people can keep their searches?), but this is most definitly not it. Firefox doesn’t have support for search repositories. It has a toolbar for search engines. Engines.

You’d expect a company who has a search engine as a major product to know what a search engine is, and that it’s called a search engine. But they apparently don’t.

And those two aren’t all the articles, press releases, and official posts, which contain terminology errors. Just a small sample.

I can allow myself to make mistakes here from time to time. It’s a personal blog, I’m not an authority on anything, and I don’t represent anyone. But for anything official, by a news service or a large company, this is not the case. They shouldn’t make these mistakes. It leaves a really bad impression.

Automatic translation tools are terrible. There’s nothing wrong at all with looking up a word at an electronic dictionary, but letting one translate a sentences always ranges between pathetic and hilarious.

Even the best of translation tools does a terrible job of discerning context. And when each word can have several different translations, and often holds several different meanings, context is everything. You get that wrong, and some of the words wrong, and the translated result is pure gibberish.

Even worse, if the translation program tries to decipher some context and fails, as will often happen, the end result may not appear to be total gibberish at first glance. But we’re still far away from tools at even this level.

And all that is even when you translate between languages which are similar, and have a relatively recent common ancestor.

You can even check for yourself, just for fun. Go to one of the available translation tools on-line, enter a paragraph of text from someplace, and try to translate it first into a different language, and then back. See what a sordid mess you’ll get.

So, to change the subject completely (OK, not really), what new toys are the Americans up to in order to assist their soldiers in Iraq?

The risky business of battle-zone translation could get a technological boost, however, as researchers prepare to test a system that instantly translates spoken conversations to and from English and Iraqi Arabic.

Funded by Darpa, the system would allow troops to communicate in Arabic through a laptop computer equipped with voice recognition and translation software. Troops could speak in English and have their words instantly translated into Iraqi Arabic, “spoken” by a computerized man’s voice. The program also translates Arabic into English.

Automatic translation between Arabic and English. Two languages which are not even close to being remotely similar. At least those people haven’t lost their sense of humour. Though they may just do that after some bad incidents of horrible mistranslation that will cost human lives.

And they’re thinking of translating voice, even, not text. Voice recognition these days is still pretty bad. The best voice recognition programs these days don’t really work under non-ideal conditions, or without a lot of time dedicated to studying each individual voice they’ll be expected to deal with.

So all they have to do here is take a badly working voice recognition, drive the output from that one through a badly working translation engine, and then synthesize the output of that one to voice. Sure. No problems at all, none whatsoever. It’s going to go perfectly smooth. Nothing at all in there that they can’t get working within the year…

The only thing that seems plausible given the time frame is the voice synthesis at the end. And, well, even voice synthesis of text isn’t too hot yet these days. But really, that’s the least of their concerns.

While our postal services generally, sometimes, do their job quite adequately, there are flukes. We do sometime get envelopes addressed to neighbours, or to someone with a similar last name but on a different street.

But the most recent such wrong delivery was more amusing. Because of the sender, the intended recipient, and the type of mistake. You see, this was not sent by a private person, nor was it one of the usual commercial messages. This was an international mail, all the way from Luxembourg. And the sender was NAMSA, a NATO agency.

Yes, NATO. Isn’t that fun? I bet most people don’t get envelopes from NATO at all. I certainly know we didn’t ever. And still, it came. Well, it wasn’t really addressed to us, of course, but those are just details.

The intended recipient, as I said, wasn’t us. Not at all. It was an unnamed acquisition and procurement specialist, in the “IDF technology division”.

Err… Except that the IDF doesn’t have anything named “Technology Division”. Instead there’s the “Technological and Logistics Directorate“, better known here as Atal. Or, to be more exact, ATL (in the corresponding Hebrew letters), which is an acronym. A for “Agaf” meaning directorate or division, T for “Technologiot” meaning Technologies, and L for “Logistica” meaning… you got that right, Logisitics. Yes, the base words for Technology and Logisitics are the same in Hebrew, which can give you a clue as to where they were borrowed from. The abbreviation is pronounced as Atal.

Normally I wouldn’t be too surprised that someone over at NATO isn’t aware of the exact way things are organized in our military. But if you send envelopes to someone, it means you have some interaction with them. Which in turn means you have to know who it is that you’re interacting with. So I find their “Technology Division” odd.

The address was indeed in the same city we live in, which explains why it got to the same post office branch. But as to why it arrived to us, that’s a mystery to me. There is no name on the envelope, so someone familiar with us at the post office (Yes, that does happen) couldn’t have gotten confused. There is no street address, so nobody could have delivered it to the wrong house on the right street. There is no house number, so nobody could have delivered it to the right house on the wrong street. All it had was a POB number, four digits, of which two are similar to ours. That would rather be, similar to ours and to plenty of other people’s. There’s a huge limit as to how much variance POB numbers can have.

So someone was sloppy.

In any case, we didn’t open the envelope. Likely it’s also not interesting, since it went from one body dealing in logistics to another. On the other hand, it also went from one body dealing in armament procurement to another. So maybe it was interesting. But the point is moot, we returned the envelope to the post office, so they could deliver it to the intended recipient. Or deliver it yet again to a wrong recipient, but that’s their problem, not ours.

Why it didn’t go through the various diplomatic or military channels is beyond me, though. If you have important (The envelope was marked as priority airmail. Which doesn’t necessarily mean anything, but it may) military related material to send, between two military organizations, trusting the usual post seems questionable. And in this case at least was a demonstrably bad idea.

Had there been anything even remotely classified in there, someone might have opened it and read it. The fact that we didn’t doesn’t mean that nobody else would have been curious. And, like I said, we’re not the only people with such a badly matching POB number.

Oh, well…

One of the lottery-like games here was given the terribly imaginative name “Chance” (as-is, no translation, the Hebrew name is the English word, assuming people would understand it. Which is a pretty fair assumption, since the word is indeed used a lot, and was practically absorbed into the used language. It’s common to hear people saying “Kakh chance”, with “Kakh” being roughly the word for “take a”).

And lately they’ve started with this terribly annoying series of radio commercials, with pretence cab drivers prattling on about how they are taking a chance to win money. Although I guess these commercial, as low-level and annoying as they seem, are at least effective in bringing the product to conciousness.

But one of them really got me annoyed at the sheer brainless idiotism behind it. And since the rest of them at least do manage to keep everything in context, I must assume that it wasn’t an attempt to purposefully make their cab driver appear idiotic, but instead genuine incompetent stupidity on the part of the text writer.

In this commercial the cab driver talks about how he picked up a passenger wanting to go someplace. The driver tells how he offered the passenger a flat predetermined rate, but the passenger insisted that he’d turn the meter on instead. And the driver tells how he told the passenger to “take a chance and” go with the suggested rate, to which the passenger refused. Then they naturally got into a traffic jam, so charging by the meter ended up costing the passenger more money. The story concludes by the cab driver once again saying that the passenger should have taken a chance.

Does anyone else notice the blatant incongruity here? Choosing a predetermined fare isn’t taking a chance, it’s the exact opposite. No matter what will happen the cost will remain the precisely known same. Choosing to go by the meter, however, would be taking a chance. If the ride goes smoothly it will be possible to save money, and if there are delays it could cost a lot more. It’s not only simple logic, but goes as to the very definition of what chance means.

That passenger did take a chance. And in that particular case it didn’t work out, and the passenger would have been better off had he not taken the chance. Having the cab driver claim that the passenger should have taken a chance is just… idiotic. It presents their cab driver, the star of the entire series of commercial, as someone without an inkling about whatever he’s talking about. Surely not the image a company would want a figure associated with them to present.

And it provides a very plain and clear example that taking a chance can cost money. Which is the exact opposite of the message of the entire commercial series, which trying to emphasize how much it’s possible to earn by taking a chance.

Next time when they spend a fortune on plenty of air time, they should avoid taking a chance, and go with advertisers who are actually capable of reading the text they’re writing…

Years ago I went with my parents to several trips arranged by the Society for Medicine and Law in Israel, of which my father (a medical doctor) was a member. At the time they had occasionally arranged nice long-weekend trips, including some guided sight seeing, and several lectures. The content was sometimes relevant to the issues the society dealt with, but often not so but just provided as entertainment, cultural enrichment, or whatever.

One such lecture/performance was done by a musician (whose name I don’t recall by now), who talked about the life of a certain mildly known Jazz singer (whose name I also don’t recall by now. Yes, I’m a fountain of information relevant to the post, ain’t I?).

The idea was to explore the life and character of this singer, but focusing on lyrics of the songs that he often performed. Not songs he wrote, mind you, he was just a performer, but rather songs he chose to sing. According to the lecturer there were close ties between those and his life. In my opinion this is nonsense, since often singers do not identify with the lyrics of songs they perform, especially not a hard working Jazz singer needing to perform a lot of the Jazz standards instead of getting songs written especially for him.

Given that people’s lives are complex, and that songs can be looked at from many angles, it is indeed possible to draw connections and similarities, I don’t deny that. It’s just that by the same way it is possible to draw connections which are just as compelling between a person and the words of a song a total stranger choose to sing. Which would be a far worse selling point, though, unless you want to go explore some tenuous supernatural angle.

Which is to say, while the lecture was interesting, and the musician performed some of the songs himself rather well, I was not too impressed by the claim that the two are connected.

And to help emphasise the point, one of the stronger connections he draw was based on a… mistranslation of a word in one of the song. Based on which the lecturer evolved an entire part about the, apparently bad, relationship the singer had with his wife.

The song in question was Gershwin’s A Woman is a Sometime Thing from Porgy and Bess. Which the lecturer, disregarding both basic English grammar and the rest of the context of this little “lullaby” song, decided to translate to Hebrew as meaning “A women is sometimes merely a thing”. And spent quite some time going on about how the fact that the singer performed this song a lot ties in to how he may have also treated his wife badly, like she’s not really a person.

Which is of course total nonsense. This sentence doesn’t say that, there is no grammatical way to read it which would say that. Even the rest of the words of the song don’t support that in the context they provide:

Listen to yo' daddy warn you
'Fore you start a-traveling
Woman may born you, love you and mourn you
But a woman is a sometime thing
Yes a woman is a sometime thing

Yo' mammy is the first to name you
Then she'll tie you to her apron string
Then she'll shame you and she'll blame you
Till yo' woman comes to claim you
'Cause a woman is a sometime thing
Yes a woman is a sometime thing

Don't you never let a woman grieve you
Jus' 'cause she got yo' weddin' ring
She'll love you and deceive you
Then she'll take yo' clothes and leave you
'cause a woman is a sometime thing
Yes a woman is a sometime thing

And yet all that didn’t prevent the guy from being very clear on this point. So based on this mistranslation he redefined his understanding of the song, and based on the resulting faulty understanding of the song he based a part of his understanding of a singer who sang it often.

The evening itself was very entertaining, but as you can tell I wasn’t very impressed with the exactness and methodology of the biographical details analysed and presented. Still, what do I know? I was just a small kid, and none of the highly educated doctors and lawyers around seemed too perturbed…

A couple of days ago I was going over some blogs I read, and came on this post by David Weinberger which actually touched on a subject I apparently know much better than him, the Hebrew language. Specifically, a mention he made about the word “chanuka” in Hebrew.

He got it pretty wrong by deciding it means lighten-up, and his first commenter got it mildly wrong by saying it means dedication. The term is more like the “warming” part of “housewarming”, the first acknowledged usage of something new (or at least the time when the usage is declared/acknowledged). It applies to new houses, and public buildings and parks, but also to things like cars, television systems, or even wines. Or, on a different meaning, it is chocked, when related to a female (Hebrew verbs take different forms for each of the two male/female genders).

Of course, the holiday Hanukkah is based on the same word, so it’s also possible the entire thing is moot, since I don’t know if “chanuka” in Swahili has a similar sound or not. Just being similarly written is quite meaningless, considering that I know the Hebrew word, at least, doesn’t really sound like an English speaker will tend to pronounce it.

So I decided to be a good little Hebrew speaker, and leave a comment on his blog post.

And couldn’t. I was caught by an overzealous anti-comment-spam device, which is even not suitable to serve against comment spam.

A little aside to the few readers who don’t know what comment spam is. You all know what email spam is, right? Incoming messages you never requested, trying to convince you to do stuff, or buy stuff, that you don’t need. Well, blog posts often have the possibility to leave comments on them. So it was only a matter of time until spammers jumped on the bandwagon, and made automatic bots (computer programs that can do many of repetitive tasks, like sending an email, or filling a form on a web page, quickly) that will leave comments which are not relevant to the post, but contain links to their sites. Often these involve porn, and card games, but the variety is as large as on the email spam.

Meaning that many measures are now tried and used in order to keep comments in blogs free of these comment spam messages. Some more elaborate, some simple. The method I use here is a very simple one, requiring anyone writing a comment to fill in an extra field. This works because those bots are automated to work against the basic and common ways comments work, and do not (yet) try too hard to go around variations.

There are many other methods, but Weinberger decided, IMNSHO, to be too smart for his own good. He tied the comment posting to a system that checks the comment poster’s IP address (The unique Internet address of the computer) against a central database, with a list of bad address used as open SMTP relays.

Another aside, about open SMTP relays. SMTP is basically the communication protocol used to send email messages. So mail servers send messages using SMTP. Spammers (the email spammers this time, not comment spammers) don’t want to use their own mail server, because then it would be easy to block their messages, and so they look for email servers which are open relays. Being an open relay mean that this mail server will accept a message from anyone, without any verification and authentication, and send it onward. This is a bad problem in the age of spammers, and email server operators are encouraged to configure their email servers not to do that.

One of the things that happened is that there are several central repositories, like the Distributed Sender Blackhole List, which contain IP addresses of mail servers which are suspected of being badly behaved in that regard. This allow other mail servers to check every incoming mail message they receive against that list, and refuse to receive messages from the suspected servers, since those message may very well be spam.

This of course has very little to do with comment spam, since those mail servers are usually not the same computers used by comment spammers to run their bots. So telling me that my own computer’s IP address is on the list, and that therefore I cannot leave a comment, is irrelevant here. Had I been trying to directly send an email messages, that would have been a different matter, but I didn’t.

There is of course another problem there, that my personal computer’s address was on the list. This is because we get from our ISP a dynamic address, meaning that it changes from time to time, and goes to other users while we get a different one from the pool. It’s possible to get a static address, but this costs more, and isn’t necessary unless you are running a server that people on the outside need to be always able to find. Or simply put, the address was blocked because someone else on the past (They had one incident, logged at February 2004) sent an email message he shouldn’t have…

Overall, like I said, a very real problem, but a very wrong solution. I sent him an email message about this, but due to his big problem of comment spam (his blog is high profile, so a very popular target) he feels that using this is justified. He was nice about it, and offered to go and take my address of the list himself. But I can talk to dsbl myself if I want to. And I don’t want to. Both because this is a dynamic address, and because it’s a non-issue. Apart from his blog this only prevents me from running my own mail server. I have no intention of running my own mail server in the foreseeable future, though. So I declined the offer, explained my position again, and that was that.

Nobody much cares about the proper way to write the term spam, and the actual relation between all those pesky spam messages and the food SPAM. Except of course for SPAM maker Hormel, which after a few lawsuits gave up and also decided to take it easier, requesting only that SPAM will be capitalized appropriately. Those pesky messages should be referred to in lower-case - spam, and their food in upper-case - SPAM.

And like I said, nobody pays too much attention, with people mostly writing it in whichever way strikes their fancy.

Today I noticed a blog post, about some unrelated joke, in which the author mentioned both kinds of spam/SPAM. He decided to be nice and civilized, which is very nice considering that like I said nobody much bothers these days, and to take the extra step of writing them differently.

And then went straight ahead to capitalize them all wrong, with SPAM (food) written as spam, and spam (messages) written as SPAM.

I’d have left a comment, but there is only so much you can do with blogs that require registration in order to leave one, and don’t even provide an email address.

This fuel station, in my city, that I often use has recently did some re-arrangement, and moved some of its fuel pumps. As part of the changes they also took advantage of the opportunity, and upgraded some of the equipment.

But they didn’t make sure that the upgrades fit together. Oh, technically everything works. It’s more of an interface problem.

The way it goes now, on several instances during the process (passing the credit card, entering car number, choosing to limit amount of fuel, and so on) the screen on the system now instructs the user to press the "Proceed" button.

Which wouldn’t be bad by itself, if it weren’t for the fact that the keypad doesn’t have such a button. There’s one labelled "Confirm", though, which works well enough.

So, yes, it’s simple, and quite easy to make the connection. Heck, I managed to do it myself. It’s still a problem, though. And considering that many people tend to be very cautions and literal when they deal with computers, I won’t be surprised to know that some people actually have to call for help saying that they can’t find the button.

The lead character (or the second lead, depends on who you ask) in the series JAG, Sarah MacKenzie (played by the excellent actress Catherine Bell), is fluent in many languages, including supposedly Hebrew.

In the recent episode "Straits of Malacca", when searching for information on a captured pirate, one of the characters gets information from a contact in Israel. But the information is in Hebrew. He asks Mac how is her Hebrew, to which she answers "Not as good as my Farsi" (The character, and the actress, speaks very fluent Farsi), but that she can handle it.

She then stands in front of a computer screen, and with a look of concentration starts to translate the information contained in the email about the pirate.

They showed the computer screen, and the email. And it wasn’t even close to the alleged content.

First of all, the text was reversed, in a LTR direction instead of the Hebrew RTL one. So when I tried reading it, it took more more time than it took her to "translate" it. She must be a very fast reader. To illustrate, try reading the following:

noitcerid gnorw eht ni si ecnetnes siht

Fun, right? Very legible.

Second, it wasn’t a personal dossier, it was a news bulletin, copied from the website of the Israeli government.

And it doesn’t talk about a pirate. It is an announcement that the site of the Ministry of Health has opened a new on-line forum on paediatric preventive medicine. The text on the bulletin, and in the email shown on screen on the show, talks about childcare: vaccines, nutrition, and so on.

I do have to hand it to her, Catherine Bell is a very good actress. The translation scene looked very convincing. She made all the right facial expressions and gestures of someone reading a text in a foreign language.
Of course, not being able to actually read what’s on the screen, she probably didn’t find it harder than any other acting chore. Someone who can read Hebrew would have had an hell of a time trying to avoid bursting out in laughter.

And I really don’t get it. JAG has a huge amount of viewers, both in the US and worldwide. They know some of them can actually read Hebrew. They went to the effort of finding text in actual Hebrew letters, but not of getting relevant text.
I’m not sure how they did it. Did they just found someone, told him "Go find a text, any text, in Hebrew" and he went and found something? Decided that the likeliest place is the government’s website, and picked the first news link there?
If the episode was shot on Jan 4th (the date in the news bulletin, which is also visible in the email message on the show), it could be. But it’s just dumb. It’s too dangerous to show random real text. If you don’t care that the text is totally unrelated, it’s safer to make a random jumble of letters.

But why have unrelated text? It seems very unlikely that they couldn’t find anyone who can read and write Hebrew. Hebrew speaking people are not that rare. How much would someone possibly charge to write an actual page of text that looks like the beginning of a personal dossier? Heck, they can turn to some fan of the show in Israel, and have it done for the price of a name in the credits.

Hey, DPB :  I’d do it myself if you need any Hebrew text for future episodes. No problems. Seriously.
If you don’t like me, I can find other people here who will.

Putting a not-relevant text, and letting a main character treat it as something else, looks very ridiculous and unprofessional. I don’t like to use words like pathetic, but, well, if it quacks like a duck… And if the text was indeed picked without any screening (which must be true, since why use it if you have someone capable of screening it?) that’s just poor judgement. You might have gotten a text about anything. That’s very very risky. For a new low-budget home indie film, that would have been understandable. But for a very serious, successful, and high-profile series?!

Lately I started to get a large number of hits from various search engines, by people searching for "Tsunma" of all things. Some alone, some together with "tidal wave" or "disaster" or other things of the sort. So I assume it’s not some ancient Japanese folk hero that they’re looking for…

So just to make it clear to the poor people that look for info and can’t find it: You spell it Tsunami, not tsunma.

Go that?

Thank you, and better luck on the next search. Glad I could help.

It has been quite a few years ago since I’ve seen this, but I was reminded of it again right now, and think I didn’t post about it previously (searches agree, but I recall wanting to post it in the past, so sorry if I did and am just repeating myself).

An acquaintance of mine that spent a few years in the US came back and had with him some nice brochures from leading universities.

One these includes pictures of students, and a sentence explaining why they wanted to go to this specific university.

There were many that detailed the high academic level, how prestigious the university is, and so on and so forth.

And then there was this nice girl that said (University name may not be correct, I don’t remember which one it was, so am picking one at random)

I wanted to go to Harvard because I wanted to be mentally challenged

This was during the time when PC speech issue was hot. Everybody was running around complaining that they are metabolically challenged, visually challenged, emotionally challenged, and the like (instead of fat, blind, and sociopathic. Well, maybe the sociopaths didn’t exactly came out in an outcry, but you get the point, I trust)….

So all in all, I’d say she succeeded admirably. But that she came like that from home, and the university probably didn’t deserve much of the credit.

I didn’t like these exaggeration of PC speech to begin with, but I think this incident really cinched it for me.

It’s so nice when people botch up translations.

I just logged into my Hotmail account, went to the inbox, and on the top of the page there appeared an ad from Microsoft. The ad was for the MSN Toolbar, and in Hebrew.

I think what they wanted to say was along the lines of "The pop-up blocker is one click away", or something of the sort. What they did say was "The ad blocker is one click away"… In their banner ad…

Which is a good point, I don’t want to see this ad. It’s quite refreshing to see simple ads that can not only describe a product, but also demonstrate that you really need it.

I have my doubts that the MSN Toolbar will work on my Firefox browser, though. But I do have the (quite wonderful) AdBlock extension, so I’m proud to report that I will now no longer need to see this ad. And they were perfectly right, it was just one click away… Thanks for the reminder.

BTW, I am aware that using the free service without seeing the ads is not very nice. But if they can discriminate against me just because I don’t live in the US or in Puerto Rico, then I’m allowed to be pissed off and not see their ads.

In a previous post I mentioned that due to high usage of English I mistakenly wished a friend good luck using an inappropriate Hebrew phrase (Using a literally translation instead of the correct semantic one).

It recently occurred to me that not only me, but many other people as well, are routinely guilty of a very similar mistake. The situation is the same one where one would like, using English, to wish "Good Luck". If the relevant activity is one that depends, even to a small extent, upon the abilities of the person, it is quite common to add something along the lines of "any may you won’t need it". This expresses the hope that the person’s abilities are up to the task, and that success would be achieved even without luck.

The good-luck semantic (though not literally) equivalent in Hebrew, "Behatzlacha", does not talk about luck, it rather just wishes a success. And yet it becomes a more and more frequent occurrence to hear people follow it by what literally means and may you won’t need it. The phrase and usage from English has entered the used Hebrew language to such an extent that it seems natural to people. Nobody ever notices that it makes very little sense to wish someone a success and that they won’t need that success. It’s understood that the second part refers to luck even though the first part has nothing to do with it.

I find it funny that there’s a common Hebrew phrase that only makes sense if you replace half of it with a semantic equivalent in English.

Living in a country speaking one language, and spending lots of time dealing with another one, has it’s problems. Like the tendency to borrow phrases and idioms.

I have a friend who has a big university test tomorrow. So naturally I wanted to wish my friend good luck. I speak Hebrew with this friend, like I do with most of them. But I read in English all the time, write in English a lot, and get to speak a decent amount of time in English.

The result of which was that during conversation I wished my friend "Mazal Tov". "Mazal" is the Hebrew word for luck, and "Tov" is good. It felt very natural to say good luck during the conversation.

There is one big problem, though. In Hebrew the "Mazal Tov" combination is chiefly, heck - always, used in a meaning equivalent to congratulations. Wishing someone a good luck is done by saying "Behatzlacha", which can be roughly translated as with success.

My friend was understandably miffed that instead of wishing good luck, I gave congratulations for success. Since it’s a hard test, and success is not assured, this was not taken very nicely.

Of course once I explained everything was alright… Now I just need to decide if it means I’m using too much English, or if it means I should just pay more attention to what I say…

Most books and movies are made in English. Yet the main language here in Israel is Hebrew, and there is some percentage (small, but not negligible) of the population that cannot understand or read English.

So there are translators, doing things like writing movie subtitles, or translating whole books. And usually they do very badly.

I’ll start with a somewhat long, but very funny (or terribly tragic, depending on your point of view) story, then proceed with the general rant and samples.

This is a real story, about the level of people getting into the profession. Our school system naturally includes English classes in several levels. It’s possible to take the highest ("five points", or whatever the way to translate this is. Yes, the irony of the previous sentence isn’t lost on me) level of the final "bagrut" tests a year earlier. And if you do that, proving that your English level is way above the norm (And these are not small kids, but 16-17 years old… kids), then you can do a "two points" course in Translation. Where they teach you how to translate English texts to Hebrew texts properly.

Personal note brutally injected in the middle of the story: I could have, but the school wanted to send me with their half of the grade at 95/100, so I declined, and did it the following year with a full 100/100. During that last year I mostly spent my English class time sitting in the classroom and reading a book while the other pupils had to pay attention to the teacher. A book in English of course. OK, back to the story.

About two years ago I got to see one of those final bagrut tests in Translation. Or at least a part of the test, I’m not sure if it was the whole of it. In this part, the pupils where presented with a text in English, and they had to translate it into correct and comprehensible Hebrew. There was free access to dictionaries (English-English-Hebrew), since the point was not to check for vocabulary but for aptitude and general ability to comprehend the texts. One of the rare cases where the Department of Education actually admits real-world uses of the knowledge will come with access to references.

And this specific text was about ice cream. Manufacturing, selling, whatever. It included a paragraph discussing some of the more esoteric flavours ice cream is made of, such as various strange fruits (Note: Culinary level in this country being what it is, any fruity ice cream taste beside banana and strawberry was, and is, exotic and esoteric). The list of strange fruits that can be used to make ice cream included figs. Yep, figs. Not that complicated, surely.

Let me translate back into English, accurately, the Hebrew translation on that test:"… ice cream in fruit flavours of… pig…". Anybody noticed the different letter there? Spot the difference : pig - fig. Well, our translator, one who, as I mentioned, had an English level far superior to most of her (It was a her, I’m not making a gender-based joke, or using this as a PC term) classmates, didn’t when reading the original text. Seemed obvious to her that figs are pork. She didn’t have any problem with classifying a pig as a fruit (Maybe she thought it was a gay pig? This begs the question of what did she think about the other fruits there).

Then these people go looking for a job to match their talents. Such as translating books and movies for the rest of us.

Did I mention that they had full and free access to lots and lots of dictionaries? I’m sure I did. So this was not a I’m not sure what this word means sort of thing. This was a certainty that ham-flavoured ice creams are the next big thing in fruity ice creams.

Being a meat person myself, I’ve been looking for that elusive pig ice cream ever since. But I can’t seem to find it even in the likelier places. Oh, well, maybe some day…

Here ends the story, going on to general rant, accompanied by a few examples, on the subject of these translations.

What prompted this post was a bit from a movie, where someone uttered a line with "wide-open beach". The translations in the subtitles was for "a wide and open beach". Meaning that the translator just didn’t know wide-open has a meaning different than "being wide, and also being open". This got me back into the mood of badmouthing translators everywhere, and recollecting past problems.

Actually, the reason I started to read books in English was the horrible translations. Growing up in a Hebrew speaking country my preferred reading language was obviously Hebrew. In fact I had a very hard time starting to read in English at grade school. I still remember valiantly fighting against a certain Road-Runner book and a certain Bugs Bunny book. Of the highly illustrated with 1-5 words per page variety.

But as time passed I read more and more real (mostly SF and thrillers) books in Hebrew, all translated from English. And found myself staring at some sentences and paragraphs not having a clue what the heck is the book talking about. Usually the solution for these incomprehension problems was to translate the sentence back into English. It became easily apparent just what word was mistranslated, and I could get a sane meaning.

Most of the early examples I don’t recall by now. So here’s a more recent one from about 5-7 years ago. I think the book was "The Rings of Charon" by Roger McBride Allen, but I’m not sure, and am not about to read it again just to make certain. Nice book if you’re into SF. In any case, I got it in Hebrew. And at one point some character was looking through a telescope and apparently watching some killer (Hebrew word "Mechasel", better English translation coming soon) slowly making it’s way across the moon. This didn’t make any sense, and there was no such killer mentioned anywhere earlier in the book. And then it hit me. Terminator. The man was watching the terminator on the moon, as in the dividing line between the illuminated and the unilluminated part of the moon.

Making a valid, but wrong in the context, translation of a word, is probably the most common translation problem I encountered. Sometimes it seems that someone translates by opening a dictionary on the word and randomly choosing one of the options, regardless of context. Some cases are so bad that it gives the distinct impression maybe different translators get different sentences. If one was given just a single sentence, it’s quite understandable if the translation doesn’t fit the context of the rest of the text. (Reminds me of the Monty Python sketch "The Funniest Joke in the World", where "They worked on one word each for greater safety" . Since most of these translations can be considered lethal, maybe there’s something to that)

Of course, some translators have a good excuse. Well, not good but understandable. The rest don’t have any excuse and are just boneheaded idiots linguistically challenged (See, I’m getting the hang of this PC thing). The excuse is that basically, as most economists would refuse to tell you while blabbering about supply and demand instead, you get what you pay for. And you don’t pay much for translations in this country.

I had an acquaintance I used to correspond with (didn’t meet the guy in person at this stage), and to exchange books with (loans only, I have a hard time making myself getting rid of books so I don’t try to). One day we talked, and I mentioned some horrible translation in a movie I saw, and started badmouthing translators in general. Which he decided to be the perfect time to tell me what he does for a living. It being making translations.
Luckily I was spared much embarrassment by the fact that he proceed to agree with everything I said about the abysmal level of translators in this country. He just told me that while it’s possible to look up words in dictionaries, or to work one’s brain and pay attention to context, the payment translators get is so low that it’s not worth their while.
I concurred that taking pride in one’s work is harder if one has to feed a family, or oneself, based on the amount rather then the quality, or one’s work.

I still don’t read translated books in Hebrew. Well, the level of translation isn’t the only cause. There is the added effect of writing style, since I buy a book to read the author’s rather than the translator’s. And the issue of selection, since most books, including the good ones, are not translated.

I do tend to try and read movie and TV subtitles occasionally. On the not very interesting movies, that is. Since it hardly ever fails to provide for chuckles.

Don’t even get me started about the sport team "Red Sox" "socks in red". Or about the "armed steel plating" "plates of weapon-bearing steel". Oh, heck, there are just so many examples… Too many examples…

This is just too amusing.

The Guardian has published a correction to an article:

Jonny Wilkinson (Gregan’s Wallabies plot new England fall, page 27, November 23) is recovering from a biceps injury, not a bicep injury. The singular of biceps is biceps. The plural of biceps is biceps.

This doesn’t sound like an explanation, or an attempt to be educational. This rather sounds more like head-bashing.
The scene I imagine is of an editor catching the poor writer of the original article and repeating this to him in an angry what-kind-of-an-idiot-are-you patronizing tone of voice…
All that’s missing in the correction is the end of the quote going like "Now repeat this 100 times until you get it", which caused the writer such a trauma that they automatically also added the mantra to the apology.

And what may be slightly more amusing - while it’s true that The singular of biceps is biceps and not bicep, the plural can be biceps, but can also be bicepses.

Oh, well. As long as mine works.

A friend called me on the IM the other day, and asked for help spelling a word in English.
The friend, whose English is usually quite good, knew that the word sounded like "satel", and gave me an example case where this word would be used.
The exact example isn’t important here, just that the friend knew what the word meant.

The word wasn’t complex, it was "subtle". Didn’t took more than a second to come up with. The friend said thanks, and that while looking for various possible spellings, sticking a "B" in the middle of it did not came to mind.

And that was that.

But it got me thinking about this in a more general case.
Personally I rarely have the problem of knowing how a word sounds but not how it’s written, since most of my English comes from books, not from speaking or from TV. So if I know a word, it’s quite likely I saw it written, and could come up with something close enough for a dictionary/spell-checker to find. But if it’s a complex word, the problem may still happen. And of course a general solution could also benefit people whose vocabulary comes mostly from watching TV, speaking, or listening to radio/music.

So I decided to see if there’s a tool that can be used to locate a word, when what is known about it is how it’s supposed to sound like, and the general meaning. This is quite a lot of info.

The first attempt was just to run a dictionary search. On-line dictionaries tend to present possible spellings/corrections.

Usually I use services like Dictionary.com, since they collect definitions from a large number of dictionaries, increasing the odds of finding the right word. In this case is was not effective, the large number of sources allowed it to actually find a definition for the acronym "SATEL", so I got no spelling suggestions.

Trying to get a correction out of Google proved fruitless as well, it didn’t find any definition, and did not suggest a correction. Surprisingly it seems that Google doesn’t bother suggestion corrections to dictionary searches, only to regular searches. And only to regular searches that return few results. Satel, and variations, have tons of results, so no suggestions.
Several other dictionaries provided suggestions, but none useful.

Merriam Webster provided a list of 14 possible corrections, the 6th being "subtle". In this case it proved helpful, and could have been used.
In a general case it may not help, however, since it doesn’t provide suggestions to words it has a translation for. If the word searched is similar enough to a real word, you’re out of luck, or have to try searching for a specifically distorted word, making the chances of a successful match smaller.

There should be some sites that allow searching for words that sounds like other words. A quick search for "dictionary sound like" returned several likely (and lot of unlikely) suspects.

AnsMe provided a long list for a "sounds-like" search on "satel", but none of the results was "subtle". And #2/#1 with 90% match was "stela" ?! How does "stela" sounds like "satel" ?

RhymeZone for "Find similar sounding words" returned 0 results. It did provide a long list of "similarly spelled words", but again "Subtle" was not one of them.
Other places in this category seems to just point to, or take results from, RhymeZone.

So time to go look by meaning. Not to make it too complex, these are the first four basic ideas for meanings I had: "delicate", "gentle", "not obvious", "not blatant".

One option is to run a regular dictionary search and try to fish a result from there. In this case it might have worked, but only since I already knew what I was looking for.
Running a search for "delicate" on various dictionaries returned pages of results that had the word "subtle" in them. But they were not useful for this purpose, since it was not practical to find those without knowing the desired word. It takes a lot of time and effort to read many definitions, and go word by word to see if something seems similar. Doable, but not practical.

Another option is to run a search for synonyms of the first two words, and antonyms of the last two. This has the advantage that the results would usually be word-lists, so are easier to search for one sounding like what we’re looking for.

Giving RhymeZone another chance: "delicate" 23 synonyms including "subtle", "gentle" 25 synonyms without "subtle", "obvious" 3 antonyms without "subtle", "blatant" no antonyms. So there was a result, but still hard to fish. Requires going through a lot of false result to find it.

WordNet: This is a more complex and powerful tool, in that it allows to pick specific meanings of the word to search the synonyms/acronyms for, though it doesn’t require it. This of course takes the time to read the possible meanings, but allows by this to eliminate irrelevant words. It also provide examples for the usage of each of the returned words, so it’s easier to get a sense of their proper context, or how they will sound in a sentence. Here too only "delicate" returned "subtle" at the end of the search. And while it was included in some of the definitions of possible meanings for "delicate", no meaning was an exact match by itself. It might have helped very well, or it might have done quite badly.

And there’s one more, relatively new, option. I recalled that a while ago I noticed an announcement by OneLook that they had a reverse dictionary. For this purpose a reverse dictionary should work quite like a synonym search, only will potentially allow use of words which are not exact synonyms/antonyms but may be found as part of a description. This makes it easier to locate words for which you don’t have an exact single-word meaning, and allow more flexibility on the words used. But it may also return a lot more false results.

I decided it’s worth a short to try. And discovered that they have another feature, which is excellent for the sort of search I need here. It’s possible to search for partial matches on words by letters, and combine this with the reverse dictionary search.

The obvious nearly catch-all way to represent the "satel" sounds-like is s*t*l*. It may be a mistake, it’s possible to spell words otherwise, but not likely. If it wouldn’t have worked, maybe a search for c instead of s, or putting another wild-card character at the beginning, might have been warranted. But mostly I tried to go from the basis of having a word sounding like "satel", so probably the changes in spelling will be extra vowels, double letters, silent letters, and such. Something beginning with an "S", followed someplace by a "T", and followed someplace else by an "L", followed by whattever, seemed good.

With this pattern of searched words, I tried again my four basic meanings, even though a reverse dictionary actually allows to try for more complex meanings. "delicate" returned 7 results, the first of which was "subtle". "gentle" returned 2 results without "subtle". "not obvious" returned a huge number of results, with the claim that they are sorted by relatedness, and "subtle" was the first one. "not blatant" also returned a lot of results, but again "subtle" was the first one.

Overall I think OneLook receives best marks for this. The reason, I think, is that from all the common tools available it’s the only one that allows to automatically search for both the meaning and the way the word sounds like. The other services only allowed to automatically search for one, and then required time consuming effort to manually go over the results.

It’s somewhat old news, but I only recently went over the two latest issues of World Wide Words, and saw this lovely bit. I probably wouldn’t have picked on this one if it didn’t involve the Marines, but having a friend who’s a JAG addict, and so turning from a sporadic to a regular viewer myself, I tend to pick on anything amusing involving the US Navy or Marines…

This is an official Marine Corps release announcing a training mission on Wake Island.
And there are several problems with it…

According to the Marines, Wake island is uninhibited. Although maybe they got confused and meant uninhabited. Could be. If you want to run training with missiles and explosives, and choose a small island with nothing much but and old and abandoned military base, it makes sense. Except that the island have about 200 residents¹, civilian contractors for the US military. That doesn’t quite fit the definition of uninhabited. I’m sure if during training a Stinger missile kills some of these people, a claim of "They weren’t there. The island is uninhabited." won’t convince anyone…
But then again, they couldn’t have meant uninhibited as well. It’s not as if the people there run around naked and have wild orgies all day, or whatever. It’s not even some indigenous tribe. They’re Americans brought there by the USAF years ago. And have reportedly not descended into barbarism…

And if this poor choice of words isn’t bad enough, according to one Maj. Tracy L. Peacock “The importance of this training cannot be understated”. Which should make about anyone wonder why bother, no?

Maybe the Marines should supply their forces a few less Stingers and a few more dictionaries. At least to those who are expected to interact with the media…

¹. Which is agreed upon not only by those residents, but also by the official CIA world factbook, and the Wikipedia entry. Which I only bother mentioning because, well, if you’re the sort of person who really doesn’t trust governments, but do trust "the people", don’t bother, as the relevant part from Wikipedia seems directly copied from the CIA. Or at least I assume it’s not the other way around ;-)

I was driving quietly in my car with the radio on to provide background music. The channel I was listening to switched to commercials, so I switched channels.
And dropped right into this incredible conversation bit.

Mind you, this is much more amusing when you consider that the discussion was in Hebrew, except for the words I’ll italic (can I use this as a verb? Italic something? Never mind) which were in English.
Putting English words into Hebrew speech during an interview will usually be done either when referring to a technical/professional term, or when wanting to preserve some exact nuances which are not there in the Hebrew equivalent. I suppose it’s the same in most cases of inserting any individual words from a foreign language (those which are not so mainstreamed they’re practically co-opted into the base language).
This mean that I’d expect the words to be used in a most exact and clear manner, right? Well, not this time.

Also worth mentioning is that the interviewee is PolSci Professor Avraham Ben-Zvi, who (among other things) published a myriad of works regarding American policy in the middle east and Israel-America relations. The quote starts in the middle of his sentence, just when I tuned in:

“… must also pay attention to the undercurrents and to the subtext of the issue.”
“Just to be certain I understand this, by subtext you mean John Kerry, right?”
“Exactly. He has a lot of support in…”

I’m very grateful I was standing waiting for a traffic light to change. If I were actually driving the results might have been disastrous.
Nice to know a possible candidate for the presidency of the US is best described as subtext…

Apparently about 377 tons of high explosives were lost in Iraq.
That’s a lot of explosives. Enough to blow up lots and lots of things, and still have much to spare. Probably enough to wage a small war.
And the US apparently knew those explosives are missing since about April 2003… The story of course broke out only now. Good to know.
I assume it means someone got all those high explosives and is just sitting on them and waiting…

I think, however, that the best part of the Reuters article, for many different reasons, is this reply by someone in US asked why the us military didn’t do something like guard this small pile of cherry-bombs:

“You just can’t leave a guard force at all these places you find. If you leave a squad at all 10,000 places that are known so far, then there’s 50,000 (troops) out of action,” said another U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity.

Certainly you can’t leave a force to guard “all those places“, if you’re talking about small empty buildings. But a pile of nearly 380 tons of explosive?! I do sincerely think you should even put a large force to guard that! Unless of course he implies that each on of the 10,000 sites he mentions contains that amount of explosives… That’s a very very scary thought. Which I hope, and believe, to be false. But if that’s the case, then I agree guarding them all is not practical. Which means they should have been either concentrated or destroyed, not left alone to get “lost”.
It is at least understandable why the half-wit chose to remain anonymous.

And then there’s the small numerical/linguistical issue there, though I assume the parentheses mean it’s the reporter’s/editor’s fault, and not the official half-wit’s… Troops does not mean soldiers! Really! If a squad consists of five soldiers, you may need 50,000 soldiers to watch 10,000 sites, but NOT 50,000 troops.

I practically always send email messages in English. Most of the people I know send email messages in English. From my side, it’s part a natural aversion (Out of habit? Too much programming and dealing with software?) to seeing non-Latin letters on a computer screen, and part the appalling lack of standards to do otherwise.
(That’s technical standards, as in how mail servers and mail readers handle things like Hebrew text. Some don’t, some badly, some very well only there are several different ways to do so and they don’t quite match. The end result is that usually reading an Hebrew email message requires some, or a lot of, work on the recipient’s end, and even then success is not entirely guaranteed.)

In any case, when I send someone here an email in English, they usually tend to reply in English, regardless of whether they prefer to use Hebrew or English themselves. And if they put in a word in Hebrew, it’s usually done in Latin characters, but quoted to indicate so. Not that for most words it’s possible to misunderstand.

Most…

I got a reply message today from a certain M, who is a friend of my very good friend V. (And M, in the highly unlikely chance that you’re reading this, just to make it absolutely clear, I am NOT making fun of you here, I am making fun of me here).
The reply was of course, like my original message, in English. All the way.
and ended with (names truncated to protect the guilty):

Thanks again and dash to V

M

At which point I’ve gotten a bit confused. Oh, alright, more than a bit. I tried to imagine what could she possibly mean by that…
The first thing that came to mind is that I was requested to send V an email with a dash (i.e. the “-” character) in it. Which made very little sense. I toyed for a few seconds with the idea of sending a message like

Hi, V!
M asked me to say - for her
Yours,
   Yaron

But decided I’d just get myself severely beaten (Is very violent, my V), and rightfully so. Scrap that idea.

The second thing was that I’m expected to drop everything and run to visit V. But while I do get to see V quite a lot on some weeks, being told to dash to her sounds very odd, and the writing style M used didn’t match. If I hadn’t spoked to V yesterday evening I might have thought something important had happened, and that I really need to go quickly. But I did, so I didn’t (Don’t you just love it when a sentence like that can actually make sense?).

Next idea was that maybe M just intended to say that she cut the message at that point since she is directly going to see V. That would be bad syntax, but not unheard of. The time frame was all wrong for that, though, as they didn’t meet last night or this morning.

At which point I’ve gotten totally stumped. Was this some clever paraphrase of the “dashed to pieces” idea? I like this usage idea enough to try and use a variation myself someday, but it would have been totally out of context here. So that’s very unlikely, and again not at all in M’s writing style up to that point.

Starting to consider replying to the message and asking (which is a big no-no, since I either admit to being an idiot that can’t understand a sentence, or imply that M is an idiot that can’t write one), the truth finally hit me.
dash wasn’t a word in English. It was in Hebrew. But it seemed natural enough to M to use it instead of an English equivalent, and to not bother quoting it.
There’s an acronym in Hebrew, pronounced like dash is, with the general meaning of sending one’s regards. The sentence could have been “Thanks again and my regards to V“, or something of the sort.
Writing in Hebrew there couldn’t have been a mistake. Acronyms are always marked as such (e.g. you would never write AFAIK, but rather AFAI”K). On a spoken conversation there also couldn’t have been a mistake, since the only other word which is pronounced the same makes even less sense than all the English versions above, unless maybe you’re an insanely focused tailor.

Problem solved.
I’m not at all certain if I should feel stupid or not. This usage is after all very common in Hebrew. And I usually do very well in spotting English words, phrases and idioms used during conversations in Hebrew… Noticing that the reverse doesn’t hold true in all cases is, well, troubling.

Oh, well. I’ll just avoid writing Native Speaker for any language in my future CVs… ;-) <