Great day today, no discussion

Sometimes you really need to go lost in translation (without being Bill Murray in a robe). I loved how deep the cultural references in Zootopia went, from race politics ("I'm not just a token bunny", "Maybe you don't know, but a bunny can call another bunny […] [Original post on localization.cafe]

Ok, Very Important Science: which song lyrics compress better with Z-lib (i.e. are more algorithmically repetitive)? https://lynn.github.io/flateview/ Imagine by the Lennon? Bah, a measly 48%. We can do better

In case you're wondering: yes, I'm back into the social media promo-spam game. I develop the ideas here on Mastodon where (simply said) I don't have to deal with moronic replies and then spin them on LinkedIN, where potential clients are. Those of you on Bluesky: do you feel there would be a […]

As I mentioned earlier, Italian stands out among other languages by never using the polite forms in software translation. A French colleague here on Localization Café asked me if that feels patronizing, but not at all. Because Italian software doesn't talk to you like a dad or even a friend, but […]

I don't talk much to my barber. I actually find the whole thing relaxing and prefer to gently doze off. And there was that one glorious time where I arrived, simply said "Good morning" and he started working right away. I could have said more, but it was so beautiful and stayed silent to the end […]

Today I had an interesting discussion with a client. They were wondering why "Your Name" had been translated into Italian as "tuo nome", using informal tone and lowercase It was due to two specific traits of Italian culture -Formal address is (lei/voi) is perceived as outdated/bureaucratic and […]

Welcome @deadycnm

Behold: the most Japanese question ever

One year at the gym Somebody asked me what I train for. Fair question, especially now that I do it every day. I guess I just like the lifestyle? Not for the performance: I've never been athletic, and will never be. I should say it's for my health, but I'm quite fatalist and don't think it […]

Fun hike last weekend: 23 hours to cover the whole 50km/+4000m span of the Yatsugatake mountain range. A few challenges, from narrow crossings with chains, strong winds and "the longest suspended ladder in the world"...

1) The new Astérix series on Netflix (pretty much a long movie) is quite good 2) The new character names are AMAZING 😄

Netflix's Wednesday should come with a Content Advisor for all localization pros: she uses a QWERTZ typewriter.

Words With Friends is probably the crappiest game I play. It’s a Scrabble rip-off that somehow takes up 391MB. It’s bloated with all sorts of crap. There are constant popups to try to sell you on overpriced cosmetics. They harangue you to turn on advertising tracking. It mostly sucks, but I […]

I climbed Fuji for my birthday. It was fun 😊

Wow, that's so wholesome 😄 Florence Foster Jenkins got known in the 40s as the worst opera singer ever. Mostly singing privately, she became so famous that when she decided to sing in public, she did it to a sold-out Carnegie Hall audience. Which laughed […] [Original post on localization.cafe]

SOMIGLIARE A UNA AI Gli effetti dell'uso estensivo di LLM cominciano a misurarsi nella modifica del linguaggio. https://www.ilfoglio.it/scienza/2025/08/13/news/le-parole-dell-ai-e-l-evoluzione-del-linguaggio-7999019/

Talking of brushes with ratings boards, my 13YO daughter really wanted to see Takopi's Original Sin / タコピーの原罪 but Netflix stopped her because it's 18+. Indeed, the story goes to some *really dark places*. So we watched it together, through my (password locked) profile. I'm sure she'll see […]

I finally got around playing Balatro. Very good fun but... sorry to tell you but PEGI was right to make it 18+. It does teach you how to play poker.

Life hack: if you're tired of living constantly blanketed by clouds, climb at 2500 m to just stay above them (*) (*) Internet and mobile coverage not guaranteed. Might not be a long-term way to make a living. So many bugs too.

New pet peeve: you shouldn't bite a medal unless it's actually made of gold. Biting that steel participation medal in photos is just sad.

My internal clock might be a bit messed up. I was just looking forward to my mid-afternoon snack. It's 9 AM.

Ufff... Work is slow and I'm really wondering what to do. Maybe getting back into the marketing/social game? Preparing a bunch of content in advance, pretty much a full-on localization course and then turn them it into meme-sized confetti? I could also layer the LocJAM into that for resonance […]

The director of a game I handled the English localization for just left the company. Instead of cookies or something, as a parting gift to the team he left everyone these “gentle steam eye masks.” Way more thoughtful and useful for game industry folks than […] [Original post on mastodon.social]

"Man, I'm so glad they went through the effort to line break each line manually, it's so much more expressive on the screen" - said no one ever

Nothing tells how low-tech localization really is like the fact I'm preparing my laptop for the workshare tomorrow... and it's a Mac Air from 2011.

Sad reminder that your phone is not your friend. In this case, Instagram detects when girls delete their selfies as the best time to show beauty cream ads. https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/facebook-accused-exploiting-teenage-girl-insecurities-shows-beauty-ads-after-they-delete-selfies-1734823

"Nobody is sitting next to me because I'm a gaijin", he muttered while scratching out a stain from his musty-smelling ahegao shirt

The story to every Monster Hunter game is pretty much the same. “Oh no, the ecosystem is out of balance! We have to find out what is going on!” You do this by conducting research. Research is done by hunting wyverns (dragon-dinosaurs). Sometimes capturing them, but mostly killing them […]

periodic reminder to backup your files regularly, people. I just had a bad evening, but it wasn't as bad as it could have been. a week of lost work, as opposed to years. 🫠

Jogging this morning with a friend working in a furniture shop -By the way, we're getting a big order from a gaming YouTuber! -That's unusual, where is he from? -Sweden -DON'T GIVE ME ANY DISCOUNTS

Vetting and implementing QA edits right now and it's such a weird dance. During the first round of edits, I was deliberately scary, shooting down anything that wasn't objectively necessary. Sorry pal, we're not here to move commas. That seemed to build a solid base and the following bugs were […]

-You're working on [FAMOUS FRANCHISE]?! The lore is so thick, how do you manage? -Piracy -What do you mean? They don't send you reference? -Yes, we get pirate PDFs and search through them -Wait what... (every single time)

I bought my Speechpulse license (Whisper-based voice dictation) It works fine 😄 Now that I'm finally free from the Fortnite mines, I find myself translating much more often and Dragon Dictate was a great help the last time I used to do that. Since we're in […] [Original post on localization.cafe]

-What can we put on the cover of our special issue about Germany? -I think I got an idea

As somebody who actually worked on testing said game, using an OS created 20 years after the fact counts as a CAN'T REPRODUCE. You can't pin that on us 😄 https://mastodon.gamedev.place/@cookie/114387540360528673

Crazy how "industrial" and "edgy" musicians are always looking for ways to make their vocals distorted, unintelligible and variously grating, and they use all sorts of effects, when you can simply use whatever the fuck doctors use for their answering machines.

Neste día de Sant Jordi, se queredes ler ficción en galego tedes a miña tradución da novela de Shirley Jackson, "A maldición de Hill House". Escrita na década dos 50 e descrita como protofeminista, a súa autora emprega unha historia de fantasmas como marco […] [Original post on localization.cafe]

If there's one silver lining to AI is how it made it much easier to explain to devs why working with machine translation sucks 😅 https://mstdn.ca/@alexanderbird/114344077464018360

PSA if you're searching for some speech-to-text soft, this one is better than Dragon and free of charge (at least for now) https://whispertyping.com/download

No Gods. No Masters.

We had thought being lucky enough to experience last night's sunset from A' Mhaighdean was amazing... but then this morning happened!

yeah we are very interesting creatures #shitpost

Come join the fediverse! We got - tech bro - fossbro - transfems, lots of transfems - one of them is trying to port fedi software to a game console you haven't heard about in 20 years - the shitposter - new creatures not yet recognized by the science committee - incomprehensible horrors of […]

Substack rival Ghost is now connected to the fediverse https://techcrunch.com/2025/03/19/substack-rival-ghost-is-now-connected-to-the-fediverse/

Elon Musk gets a lot of hate. But that’s not enough. We can do better.

Do I know any #english lawyers? Nothing bad, I am just curious how someone would get case documents out of the court system for a tribunal I did back in 2014 - Since I assume those documents are "public" now. #UK #law #solicitor #barrister #courts #procedure #legal #Vogon #basement #storage […]