Greek frigate programme

Translation/adaptation for Mer et Marine:

Short French version: Frégates grecques: la France présente son offre finale 

English: France presents final offer for next-generation Greek frigates

Translation reviewed by Julien Rosso at Maritime Translation.

Euphemism of the month

In One craft conquers air, sea and subsea domains, MaritimeJournal technical journalist Jake Frith writes:

VICTA is focused primarily on the defence market and one of her hallmarks is the inconspicuous insertion and extraction of ‘task-oriented force packages’ (ED: military euphemism of the month) at range.  Extending that range by including airborne delivery offers further flexibility and so enhances the potential of the craft.

The comment 'military euphemism of the month' highlights one technical journal's view of a technical term used by other technical journalists working in an allied domain. Portions of the maritime domain and industry are, of course, close to and even overlap with portions of the military domain and industries.

Like other journalists and writers, technical journalists read each other's work, monitor, and occasionally, as here, comment publicly on each other's terminology. Needless to say, translators of technical journalism should follow suit.

The 'euphemism of the month' may be intended as cheeky or possibly even cutting, but I think it is also fair to say that technical journalists in all domains are quick to pick up on all types of new terminology, including euphemisms, acronyms, and the like, not to mention constantly changing comparisons and metaphors that arise, then become fashionable before either disappearing or coming to be seen as clichés. Technical journalists track all this in their domains and in the language or languages in which they write professionally. Their translators need to constantly do the same in both their source and target languages; the latter even more closely than the former.

NavTechGloss: client satisfait

La publi-info postée par Mer et Marine le 15 mai donne une indication du niveau de satisfaction du client.
Voir 18ème édition du Lexique français-anglais de technologie navale.

NavTechGloss: Over 600 hits

My post (below) on NavTechGloss has now logged over 600 hits and almost as many downloads. Most satisfactory given the level of specialisation.

Online portfolio

Further to My public portfolio posted on 25 May 2018, additional articles can be viewed here.
The originals of these articles are also available on the Mer et Marine site.
Some are accessible free of charge while others are behind the Mer et Marine paywall.

Switching to Mac, take #2

I've now worked on my MacBook Pro for at least a couple of hours a day for over three months. I'm happy with the hardware and amazed how good the Time Machine is when you need it. I have not yet had to rebuild the machine (i.e. software, apps and files) but am confident that should the need arise it will go very smoothly. This is a huge advantage over the major hassles associated with rebuilding a Win10 machine, something I have had to do far too often over the last three or four years following a number of Win10 crashes and failures and various hardware failures. It took me three or four days each time and I never seemed to get things back to exactly the way they were before.

More generally the transition is going less well. I tested the LibreOffice word processing package throughly, but found it had too many shortcomings to suit my needs. Next I moved on to Microsoft Office 365 and more particularly Word 365 for Mac, but was astounded to find that it is very different from Word for Windows OSs. The shortcuts are all different, the autotext hardly works at all and many, many other tricks of the trade had to be relearned, sometimes painfully. And, after two months on Word 365 there are still some things that I used to be able to do under Win10 but still can't under MacOS.

Other disappointments abound.

• When searching for files by their name, I find Spotlight cumbersome compared to Everything.
• When manipulating files, I find the MacOS Finder and ForkLift cumbersome compared to Zabkat's xplorer² File Manager.
• When searching for text in a file, I find both Spotlight and HoudahSpot utterly hopeless compared to dtSearch.
• Though loudly proclaimed, I find HoudahSpot clunky and incredibly slow when searching for anything more than a single word. Unlike dtSearch it appears to be completely incapable of searches like searchwordroot*, let alone searchwordA within N words of searchwordB (searchwordA w/N searchwordB) and fuzzy searches. dtSearch does any of these in an instant and displays the relevant portion of any file I select in the list of hits.

Conclusion

For me and my workflow, Mac offers a couple of big benefits (reliable hardware + Time Machine) and a host of shortcomings.

If I could find a PC manufacturer offering the sort of hardware reliability that was still common ten to twelve years ago and an app to faithfully backup then reinstall a Win10 OS complete with all the settings for all my apps, I think I would return to PC in a wink.

So for the moment I have decided to persist with my Mac conversion process. I will soon install 

Parallels® Desktop 15 for Mac

 and Win10 so that I can use Office 365, IWS, dtSearch and Everywhere under Win10.

I will report back here in due course.

Switching to Mac, take #1

The Macintosh computer first came out, with a memory capacity of 128K, in 1984. I purchased my first Mac, with 512K of memory and a pinwheel-drive matrix printer, in 1985 or 86. It was powered by a large and heavy uninterruptible powersupply, or UPS, containing an iron-core transformer. In 1989 I purchased a more powerful SE30 with a 10M external hard disk and a portrait-style A4 screen. Each item represented a significant investment. Indeed the first two were made with the aid of bank loans. To protect my investment, the hardware was covered by insurance policies for theft, breakage and lightning damage, my house and office being in a rural area.

Earlier this month, after my new Asus laptop died just six months after the guarantee had expired and some serious frustration with Microsoft Windows 10 and Office 365, I decided to switch back to Mac, specifically a MacBook Pro. Fearing that it would take some time to bring my keyboard reflexes up to speed and more still to become familiar with all the new software, I would not have given the switch a moment's thought had I been working full time. But, being mostly retired, I saw the transition as a challenge.

I have now been playing around with my MacBook Pro and LibreOffice Writer for two weeks. I'm making reasonable progress but my keyboard reflexes and software skills still leave a lot to be desired. Amazingly, I have yet to work out how to select text then extend the selection one word at a time using the keyboard rather than the mouse or touchpad in Writer, Mail, or any of the other apps I use.

I suspected before making the switch that dtSearch does not work on Mac, nor anything like it and that the same is true of IWS. For further details, see dtSearch + IntelliWebSearch, take #2. In a private emails, David Thede, the author of dtSearch (hence the 'dt' in the name), and Michael Farrell, the author of IWS, confirmed that their products are not compatible with Mac, that no Mac versions and planned, and, worst news of all, that they knew of no comparable products that run under the MacOS.

Has my use of dtSearch and IWS won more admirers, others might have joined me in the quest for the best alternatives on Mac.

So far, I have found only HoudahSpot for harddisk-wide searches, but so far it appears to be a very poor second to dtSearch. To make better use of the keyboard and shortcuts, I am exploring  PhraseExpress and Keyboard maestro.

* Finally found out how to select or deselect the next word. Amazed that this was so difficult to find.
** The command I'm now looking for is how to get the cursor to return to where it was before moving it to somewhere else to, say, select some text.