Previous Posts in the Web Promotion Blog Archive.
These two posts have been moved from the spiral cat site blog and recorded here on this page. as the main page is updated then they will be joined by the other updated material.
Translation Problem
A great week for Spiral Cat both the language teaching and translation parts of the business seem to be growing. Our language teaching ideas are just right even for our youngest clients who are learning to sing "The Wheels on the Bus" right now. It's fun and interesting for them and so they learn. ...The crocodile on the bus goes snap, snap, snap...We also had a very interesting translation to do the other day. A client was playing with the idea of meaning and identity by using the word ending ...in. This is common in German speaking countries, when we would say actor/actress needed, Darsteller/in would appear in German. The word was being played with in this way to show some hard to capture philosophical point. The interesting thing was that in English the word could not be elegantly made female with a word ending but instead by jamming the whole word female in front. When one language uses one word and another two is anything lost in the translation between the two. In English we use two words to make the infinitive, e.g. to go, is it OK for Captain Kirk to split the infinitive and "To boldly go where no man has gone before"? Is he being sexist when he uses the word man or is he reflecting the Germanic roots of his language in using man to make indirect speech and making his text sound older more biblical and important? Maybe someone reading a translation wouldn't notice but in an important way that the creator of the text intended maybe they would
Tuesday, February 20, 2007
Web Stuff
I'm going to talk a little about what I have done with my website today.
I have made much more progress than I thought possible. A couple of thousand people have looked at my site since it was created and it has been found and clicked on quite often by people using Google. I have even been Googled, I was checking through my site reports looking for ways to improve the site and I noticed that one of the searches reported for Google was my name, Brett Fitzpatrick, a proud moment for me. My first Googling.
While I was checking the reports today I noticed that one of my most popular pages is the advice I give on using mp3 to learn a language, specifically the page of links to good quality free spoken English mp3s
http://spiralcat.co.uk/mp3.aspx
In hind sight something I could have probably predicted. I spent some time working on it as any of these most popular pages are really shop windows or calling cards for a site, even though it is relatively buried in the hierarchy it is one of the most viewed pages and I am really going to have to do even more work and make the most of it.