“Did My Cat Just Hit On Me? An Adventure in Pet Translation“, a report in the New York Times on August 29, 2022, by Emily Anthes, tells about new attempts to build computer-based devices that will translate cats’ and dogs’ utterances into human speech. The report does not mention that these devices follow in the footsteps […]
UA Geek created the first Ukrainian language translation of an Ig Nobel Prize ceremony:
Lesson: When translating your study title into another language, check for cannibalism. Here’s an example: “Nutritional Characteristics of Lithuanian Olympic basketball team-players,” Rimantas Stukas [pictured here], Marius Baranauskas, Proceedings of the International Conference on Non-Communicable Diseases Management, Klaipėda, 2012, p. 25.
On the Wordmap web site you can listen as the word “improbable” is mechanistically translated into many languages, and then see which countries commonly use each of those translated words. The translations are performed by Google Translate. The country associations are performed using data from Wikipedia. It’s not just “improbable”. Wordmap will translate and map pretty much any word […]
The news site Tottenahmnews.org supplies science news of a sort, translated, sort of, from Turkish into English. (Thanks to investigators John Bradley and Peaco Todd for bringing it to our attention.) Here are some highlights. We suggest you read them aloud, especially if you are in a public place: Scientists discover massive lake of freshwater […]
‘Yawp’ is a widespread problem in China. • Causing problems in fuel cells – see: Using of the wavelet theory in wiping off the yawp from the fuel cell signals • negatively impacting power plants – see: Control Technology and Example on Yawp in Thermo Power Plants • provoking uncertainty in microwave standards – see: […]
Investigator Daniel Heller [pictured here] alerts us to something peculiar that pertains to a soon-to-be-published study he co-authored. The study is “Peptide secondary structure modulates single-walled carbon nanotube fluorescence as a chaperone sensor for nitroaromatics“, PNAS 2011 : 1005512108v1-6. Heller writes: “[Someone] seems to have translated an online post about our article into a foreign language and […]
Here’s a new episode — #McG-002, “”The Tay Bridge Disaster” with Dr. Elena Bodnar — of the Improbable Research TV series. It’s the 2nd of many episodes featuring the bad poetry of William Topaz McGonagall. William Topaz McGonagall, who died in 1902, is widely regarded as the worst poet ever to write in the English language. The […]
A book just published in Thailand is a translation (into Thai, from Japanese) of Ranai Kuga’s book (ISBN 978-4484082226) about the Ig Nobel Prizes. (We have heard of Kuga’s book, but have not actually seen a copy.) Here’s a rough machine-translation of a review of the newly published book (ISBN 9789744434371): Perhaps crazy idea to […]
A 2002 Ig Nobel Peace Prize-winning device is coming to the iPhone and to Twitter. Crunchgear has a perfect headline and a succinct report: Bowlingual: iPhone app translates what your dog barks, posts it to Twitter Do you remember the Bowlingual, the portable dog language translator that was released in Japan last year? The basic […]