19 August 2016

Beyond curly quotes

Brit Bitch Berlin is one hell of a name for a blog and The Short and Curlies is one hell of a name for a post ... but the lady (Ms Galina Green) writes both well and wisely.

The Short and Curlies is on:
Quotation marks, double inverted commas, speech marks, guillemets, goose feet, citation marks, duck feet, smart quotes, curly quotes, dumb quotes, whatever you want to call them, we really have to master them in the languages we work in – there’s no goose stepping around it. Oh and then there are the scare quotes and – my favourites – air quotes.
and it's fascinating.

At one point she writes:
Just for the record, the only place you should be using dumb quotes is when you’re coding. Which is probably never.
On this I beg to differ.
The other place is when compiling glossaries and doing terminological work. Why? Because once your efforts have been indexed by an indexing engine, some search engines are liable, when launching a search containing quotation marks or an apostrophe will sometimes miss the curly kind, but never the dumb ones. At least that's been my experience to date.

Her post on  is also very good.

ChatGPT, a drafting aid for translation by emulation

On 17 October 2011, I published the first of two posts summarising my general approach to the type of translation/adaptation services I was ...