Beware the \'find and replace\'...

[Highmac]

We've been reading the UK book version of Catch Me If You Can, the story of American conman Frank Abignale. Spellings have been changed to the UK versions. Unfortunately it appears nobody read proofs afterwards. True, we use 'cheque' for a bank check... but I've never seen any reference here to an airport's "chequein desk"

[Gregg]

spellcheck = automated intelligence = human laziness

[hingyfan]

Uh, maybe i'm giving away privilged info, but instead of Knicks coach Jeff Van Gundy, "Jeff Van Gonads" almost reached publication while back. Fingers pointed at a lazy spellchecker who is a big fan of a recently retired but still charming female tennis player.

[themphill]

Likewise, beware language translation done by a machine. Altavista's Babel  Fish  Translation Tool provides one example.

To see how bad such tools are, take a simple paragraph and give it a round trip through the software. English to German then back to English, for example. The results are invariably bad and often hysterically funny, too.

Reminds me of the game we played in elementary school, "post office," where a simple sentence was passed verbally from person to person until the final recipient would reveal how the message came out.
 
 [ 03-13-2003, 06:30 PM: Message edited by: themphill ]

[Xairbusdriver]

I'm currently reading a book called "Steel my Soldiers' Hearts" by Col. David Hackworth, RuggedLand, LLC (?). It is obviously 'type set' from computer files done on different machines/times. The quotation marks randomly vary between inch marks and 'curly quotes!'     Very irritating for slow readers like me!

I also got carried away recently with a simple copy and paste routine. Unfortunately, I was copying ASCII code and not really watching what I should have. Only after viewing the text in a browser did I realize all the time I had wasted! Sure kept me 'off the streets' for a while.     Wish I could just blame the computer for my stupidity...        

Jim C.

[hingyfan]

Yeah, Babel Fish.
I have a fan web site for that tennis player, and when she was on top of the world, i got a lot traffic and emails. I got one from a Swiss guy, in French (Hingis is Swiss, via Czechoslovakia, but speaks Swiss-German, what this has to do with anything, i have no idea ). So I ran it through the Alta Vista thing and got what I thought it meant. It was some simple thing like how long have you had the web site.
I wrote my reply and put that back into French via Babel Fish and sent that off.
I got a two-word reply that need no translation.
What it is i said i'll never know.
 I had somebody at work who actually knows French write an apolgetic message but there were no further replies.

[Highmac]

Reminds me of one newspaper system I worked on where hitting return in the spellchecker gave different results. In the 'short' version, hitting return caused it to skip the questioned word. In the 'expanded' version, return replaced it with the first in the list. You can imagine the result when one sub, after a heavy night and just not concentrating, got it wrong, and caused a whole feature about soap operas to run with replaced words. The most memorable replacement was "Cindy the slapper" being turned into "Sandy the slipper".
For anyone who cares, the program was called PageSpeed. Anyone who has to use it has my sympathy. (Just to cover myself... it COULD have been the way it had been set up at that particular paper...    ).

[Gregg]

http://abcnews.go.com/wire/US/ap20030314_218.html ...on my home page this morning. I haven't read it yet. Title is: Spell Chech can Make Righting Worse -or something like that.

[weldiger]

quote:Reminds me of the game we played in elementary school, "post office," where a simple sentence was passed verbally from person to person until the final recipient would reveal how the message came out.
by: themphill  

Wow!

I'm glad that I didn't go to school where you did!  That Ain't the way we used to play "Post Office"!

   
wd