Using Google
July 23, 2004
I'm currently subtitling the actors' commentary of Shaun of the Dead, the first romzom (romantic comedy with zombies) ever. It's a very funny film that I recommend, especially to zombie film fans like me who also like a good spoof. I came across "two-way mirror" and hesitated; was it "glace sans tain" or "glace sans teint"? I typed "glace sans teint" in Google: 428 hits. Quite conclusive, I thought. I typed in "glace sans tain": 562 hits. Not so conclusive anymore. I had a look at my dictionaries: it was "glace sans tain".
This is a great illustration of why I'm always very cautious when I use Google during my work. It can be brilliant to find information, facts, and latest developments in language that dictionaries haven't had time to catch up on, but it can also lead to serious mistakes. All those billions of pages are, after all, written by fellow fallible fools, and it's best to rely on trusted sources, like good old dictionaries.
Posted by céline, in It is a funny job, on July 23, 2004I use google so often to check my terminology. I take your point entirely though! One clue for the correct solution of course is to see whether the expression you are looking for appears on sites with the relevant endings (.be or .fr or possibly .ca [?!) for French, .at or .de for German etc and of course eu.int for official EU terminology). There are so many words out there that have never made it into the printed dictionaries (especially in German, where words can be created along various well-known rules and yet come to have very specific meanings. Then Google is the only way unless you have a tame specialist at the other end of an email address.)
One other great thing is that these weblogs will (I hope) be googled too :-)
Kind regards
David
I don't thing Google is a good place to check spelling, and your example is probably just one among thousands. Especially with my language pairs, both German and Croatian, you can never be sure who spelled a word correctly. In fact, there has been an increase in wrong spelling among Germans after the new orthographic rules have been introduced. Plainly, Germans are having great difficulties with the right spelling, and Googling is therefore no good choice.
Posted by Sonja Tomaskovic on July 24, 2004 7:26 PMI'm insanely jealous of these excellent projects you work on.
Oh well - I'll get back to my very unfunny financial translation.
Posted by Jez on July 25, 2004 12:59 PMJez: don't be too jealous. Imagine 5 actors, all half-drunk, constantly making untranslatable jokes and dubious puns. It's fun but I'm struggling.
Posted by céline on July 26, 2004 9:44 AMPrevious: July 21, 2004
Saddam >>
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