I had no idea until today that glyphosate-resistant GM sugar beet is a thing here.
09.03.2026 23:42
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I had no idea until today that glyphosate-resistant GM sugar beet is a thing here.
This is the warning on the blood pressure monitor my dad just got.
Exceptional work. Anybody know what the fuck itβs supposed to mean?
Last line is especially ominous
β°π Calling all professional and aspiring translators: the deadline for applications for Oxford Translates is fast approaching.
Apply by the 16th March to make sure you don't miss out on our scholarship places (see our website for details).
Apply by the 31st March for the early-bird discount!
Siri, tell me what comes after hubris?
Two young morel mushrooms with brown, honeycombed caps growing from under a decaying piece of cardboard.
Morel season is here.
The Chilcot Checklist, for how to optimally plan and execute military operations in light of learning from the Iraq War. It states: The Chilcot Checklist 1 VISION: why do we care? What does this mean for British interests? What are the risks of acting or doing nothing, including in the longer term? What is different now? 2 ANALYSIS: what IS happeNINg NOw? What are your sources of ground truth/evidence? Have assumptions been exposed to analytical tools or external challenge? 3 SCENarIOS: what might happen next? Have you looked at a range of options, and scenarios and consequences that could flow from these? 4 OptIONS: what should we do? Have you designed your options collaboratively, built in challenge and presented Ministers with clear information on risks, opportunities and costs? 5 LegaL ImpLICatIONS: how do we eNSure actION IS lawful? What is the wider legal context? Are Ministers aware of any legal risks? What are the policy implications? How will you ensure that any international legal basis remains sound if circumstances change? 6 POLICY AND Strategy: what does suCCeSS LOOk LIke? Does a clear strategy, and a feasible course of action that will meet policy objectives, exist? Is the approach supported by analysis? 7 reSOurCE: what do we need to deLIVer? What are the resource implications of your options? 8 PLANNING AND DOING: how should we do it? Have you planned for a range of possible contingencies? Who is accountable and responsible for what? 9 POLICY perfOrmaNCE: how wILL you mONItor performaNCe? How will you measure and evaluate success/failure? 10 EVALuatION: IS the pOLICy workINg? When and how will you review this policy? Has the context changed? Have UK objectives/interests changed? Do you need to change direction?
Way beyond military strategy & operations this checklist makes sense
Like any critical situation though the emotional urge maybe to think itβs a unique crisis & you should throw out the rules, my learning from Critical Care in health is that in crises you lean into what youβve learnt not panic away
"The obvious example in contemporary British politics is being tough on immigration β a posture that is almost impossible to translate into policies that are both workable and sensible, let alone just"
Read the latest Viewpoint from @seatrout.bsky.social β¬οΈ
But while Google Translate is relevant to translation, ChatGPT is not, for a reason that reveals something deep about its limitations. You can ask ChatGPT to "write a story in the style of Marcel Proust," but that is different from "Translate this particular Proust story into English": the latter is precisely what ChatGPT can't do, because to translate a story requires reading it. Translation is a kind of writing linked to a kind of reading - a reading of another text, the original. While Chat-GPT can comb and cull and copy and crib and collage - and to that extent it can "write" - what it can't do is read. This is why it generates references to non-existent legal precedents and fake articles, quotes passages that aren't real, and so on: it is fed with and works with texts, rather than coming into contact with what's actually in the world.
Excellent explanation of why AI tools can't translate.
Source: The Philosophy of Translation by Damion Searls
This war isnβt an emergency that requires us to give the president more latitude. Itβs a monstrosity that requires that judges, lawmakers and above all citizens work to preserve the integrity of elections and the republic.
βA job posting for a βWikipedia Translatorβ from OKA offers $397 a month for working up to 40 hours per week. The job listing says translators are expected to publish β5-20 articles per week (depending on size).ββ
(See also: clues that the client used machine translation/AI)
"Contact windowperson" for ζ ε½ηͺε£ is my favourite mistranslation so far in this review job.
And the people "checking" AI slop are paid less than for translating, while it is usually just as much work, and often a lot more work, to "check" and rewrite slop than to translate from scratch.
If you feel that use of AI art assets at any stage of the process is an automatic out, but ChatGPT translations are fine if they're "checked" by people, it might be worth asking yourself why that is. Because it sounds a whole lot like valuing the work of translators less than other creatives to me.
That's not a military operation, that's a gaming keyboard.
On a macro scale, working with ideas and getting those right is potentially far more important than translating, e.g., a list of drug side effects! Less immediately damaging to individuals if you get it wrong, but with much greater longer-term implications.
I should clarify that I'd never rely entirely on *Google Translate as a dictionary* for individual words and short phrases. I don't use ChatGPT for research at all; in my field (medical translation) it's wrong often enough that it's both quicker and safer to check the search results myself.
It depends on the source material. For non-specialist content, it gets the meaning across (probably better for European languages than Japanese?). For specialist content, I'd never rely on it entirely, though it can be helpful as one resource among others.
That's absolutely the problem in translation. I won't use AI (and strip out the AI overviews from Google search) because I have to be able to trust that what I find when I'm searching for how to use a term is correct; and ChatGPT at least is wrong often enough to make it unusable.
This is an extremely fun way to kill a few minutes on a by-election day: generate your own Allister Heath headlines. Here's mine.
Hello translation/literature people.
Am looking for examples of translations where there were foreign words in the source text. For example, English words in a German text, say. And then how this text was translated into English. Any interesting examples of what the translator did?
The Olympics look different from different places, depending, for example, on whether your viewing might be interrupted by an air raid siren or your electricity cut by a missile attack.
snyder.substack.com/p/watching-t...
Itβs easy to think writing is mainly the transcription of ideas you already haveβthat is, until you try to write something worthwhile, and you find what you thought were saying transform into something far more interesting in the process. This skips that last step, and that is *not* an improvement.
What about my half-British, half-Japanese kids? Born in Japan but registered British at birth and educated in the UK from secondary level. Does Restore count them as British through me, or does the "one-drop" rule apply?
Four Akira Kurosawa films playing at the BFI IMAX to coincide with the British Museum's Samurai exhibition
I often work for a translation agency with their own translation tool that sometimes "locks" strings that have already be translated. They are not paid, but you can display them for context. You can also see the full history: when it was translated, who worked on it, etc.
It often causes issues ‡οΈ
Something's going on here
gardencourtchambers.co.uk/extinction-r...
That's fair. I also wondered if they would have it combing Nextdoor and similar.
How is AI supposed to identify possible stories, unless these stories are already online?