Month: April 2025

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.

False friends are sometimes talked about by enemies.
Long, long ago, I was sitting in an aircraft listening to a language I don’t work with anymore, having almost totally lost my speaking ability, while retaining some reading ability, in that language. I heard the following, spoken by someone in another aircraft.

[Я] выпустил шланг.

When I was growing up in the US I was exposed (linguistically, anyway) to the last word in that sentence (shlang) but only in its borrowed meaning in Yiddish slang as spoken in the US.

That meaning is generally understood (although frequently spelled differently) in the US across ethnic and language boundaries, and I was rather surprised that someone in a military aircraft would announce that he had let it out. I would’ve thought that he would have kept it to himself, so to speak.

I was young and inexperienced, and in spite of my high grades in Russian, I did not understand the borrowed sense of the word in Russian (hose). Before I realized what was being talked about, the revelation of its being let out caused me to chuckle.

A colleague sitting next to me in our aircraft didn’t realize what was going on; I was listening (it then occurred to me) to an air-to-air refueling exercise, and he was listening to something else.

And now back to regular programming.

Surprise! ChatGPT thinks it knows me.

I asked ChatGPT who William Lise is, and it came back with this in just a few seconds.

It believed everything I say about myself on my own website. Good for ChatGPT. It slipped up, however, by including, ostensibly as a photo of me, a photo of a guy who died in New Zealand a few years ago. Nice try. I am still around. A translator in Austria, Michael Bailey, helped me with this, probably by using image search.

LISE, Steven William

Please, Microsoft!

Please, Microsoft, stop promoting things to users of LinkedIn that are patently bullshit. Your AI should be able to figure out what is bullshit, but maybe there’s money to be made by promoting bullshit.

With the only clients most freelance translators can acquire quickly moving to eliminate their need to use and pay professional translators, Microsoft’s LinkedIn recently decided to suggest a post for me from a translator advising beginning translators not knowing where to start to do volunteer translating.

The post ends with the requisite wall of hashtags aiming at getting engagement, and it features a lovely carousel of places that want free translation. It’s classic LinkedIn eye candy and totally meaningless.

There is a good reason why new translators don’t know where to start, and it’s because there are almost no places and ways to start translating for a living since AI use by translation-brokering agencies transformed the business of freelance translating into a non-business.

Almost no translators, and particularly newcomers, are fit-for-purpose in a market that does not value professionals and requires professionals wanting to survive to engage in translation as a business, for a while, anyway, until everything goes away.

The subject suggested post, of course, gives no hint as to what these volunteer translators should do to earn a living after they virtue signal with pro bono translation and build a portfolio of work they’ve done for free. There are very few ways to make a living translating these days, and those very few ways are accessible to only a tiny number of translators. Let’s stop the bullshitting. People dreaming of being translators need to be told to look elsewhere to make a living. They don’t need to keep their day job, they need to search for one.

Things I can do without ♫ In Kvetchalot ♫

I am on the high-performing curmudgeonism spectrum—high-performing so that people don’t think I’m dysfunctional, and spectrum, so that I benefit from the trendy “spectrum advantage.”

I have problems with numerous things. I would have “issues” with them, but I just cannot purge the word problem from my active vocabulary. Such is the cross that must be borne by a person who arrived just about a month before the baby-boomers.

Problems I kvetch about form a list that grows, shrinks, and changes to suit what pisses me off on any particular day. Some of the items remain unchanged, however. Here are some current annoyances, some frequent annoyers and a few targets of annoying opportunity.

  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and language, but who stay here for years, endlessly complaining about Japan
  • Foreigners in Japan who know almost nothing about the country, the culture, and the language, yet are hopelessly and senselessly in love with Japan and everything Japanese and cannot bring themselves to see that, like all countries, some things are awry in Japan too. There is a significant overlap between these people and those who can’t name any Japanese food other than sushi.
  • Foreigners who think that Japanese eat sushi all the time.
  • Foreigners who believe that veganism is common in Japan and that everybody here is a devout Buddhist. Perhaps that’s true in the atypical places they hang out, or what the view of Japan is where they live.”Social media” companies such as Meta, which use information donated to them by their willing victims to make money by helping criminals.
  • People sending spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Spam selling fake goods from China.
  • Fake goods from China.
  • China.
  • Japanese ketchup bottles designed so that, when squeezed, they remain in the squeezed shape unless they are carefully coaxed back to their designed shape. Definitely a candidate for the Japanese government’s Bad Design award.
  • Public toilets in Japan with neither paper towels nor hot-air hand driers. If you expect people to wash their hands after pissing or shitting, please provide means for them to dry their hands. My response is not to wash my hands in such places; no apologies needed.
  • Train station platforms in Japan with no trash bins decades after the Aum Shinrikyo sarin-gas domestic terrorism that prompted railroads to take them away, for fear that they would serve as drop points for poison-gas bombs. Many people have long-since forgotten why they can’t find these receptacles.
  • People getting so drunk in Japan that they need to chuck their noodles in public. To be fair, this has become quite rare, but one is still occasionally treated in the morning to “flower displays” of last night’s noodles on sidewalks and train station platforms.
  • Japanese broadcast media that avoid mentioning cigarette smoking in the same breath (or in the same news story) with cancer or other specific ailments. This is probably either because they are NHK, certainly influenced by the Japanese government, which is the leading shareholder of Japan’s only tobacco company, Japan Tobacco, or because they are private broadcasters making money from JT’s “health-washing” corporate identity advertising.

Desperate and Clueless Spaghetti

Two plates of spaghetti were thrown against my wall today. They were of different flavors but essentially demonstrated the same phenomena of desperation and cluelessness. Neither had a chance of sticking.

This morning, I received two emails at an email address that was formerly listed on the US Embassy website in harvestable form. I have since changed that to just my URL, but it’s been harvested before and anyone can go to directly to my business website to read from the graphic of the email address if they really want it. Two people today really wanted it.

One was a real estate broker wanting to sell me on “unlisted” condominium for about USD 1.7 million.

It was, of course, a non-personalized, shotgunned cold-call email.

Several minutes after that I received an email from a translator in Europe—a place on the Balkan peninsula to be a bit more specific—offering translation services in a variety of European language directions at about EU 0.027 per word.

Amazingly, his selling point was that he uses Trados, and his CV indicates that he does everything. Well, I don’t mean that he claims to “do everything,” but rather that he lists the fields he can do, and it’s, basically, everything, in a large word cloud of totally unrelated fields.

Yes, desperation and cluelessness are the underlying themes in the emails that made it through my server-based spam filtering today.