Learning was fun

The other day I watched “cerfs-volants de kaboul” or the kite runner. It is not at all my intention to do a film review, rather to share a linguistic experience. I watched the movie in “VO” with French subtitles. About one third of the dialogues are in Pashto (hoping that there weren’t any other dialects). Normally I wouldn’t follow Pashto at all, but for the French subtitles. Following the dialogues while reading the subtitles was a kind of revelation. It was really a pleasant surprise to find the extent of similarity between Pashto, Urdu and Hindi: for instance, the noun “guftgu” meaning conversation in Urdu which is often used in North India without forgetting the bollywood movies. In Pashto the infinitive form of this noun means “to tell”. There were several other words. It was a nice exercise to watch an English film with French subtitles while following Pashto (which reminded me of Hindi!). I haven’t read the book , but came across some book reviews where someone has pointed out the linguistic aspect.

writing in bengali script

I wanted to maintain a page in bengali since I long time. Did’nt really find time before. Now at last it’s done. I have barely started. Unfortunately I have not really typed bangla regularly. But surely I will pick up speed and hopefully maintain one page talking about translation and life in general. Thanks to the  ekushe team for making it possible. For the moment you can read the bengali script only in Mozilla firefox. I am trying to find the solution for internet explorer.To get a better view I recommend you to download the avrokeyboard layout.

অবশেষে বাংলা। দারুন লাগছে। তবে এই প্রথম টাইপ করছি তাই কিছুটাই সময় নিচ্ছে। অনেকদিন ধরে চাই ছিলাম বাংলায লিখতে। তার ওপরে আমার কিবোরড ফরাশি ভাষায়। বছর চারেক হলো ফ্রানসে। তাই অভ্যশ নেই। অনুবাদের ওপরে এই ব্লগ যখন শুরু করেছিলাম, তখন ভেবেছিলাম যে একটা পাতা অন্ততো বাংলায় থাকবে। ধন্যবাদ মেহদি হাসান এবং বিপ্রকে।

 

 

 

Online scientific data sources

The following are a list of free scientific sources available online. The first one is called scirus. It’s a search engine on scientific information bringing together several academic websites providing authentic and reliable research sources as well as data banks.
scirus
Free archive of life science journals : http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
Free journal access : www.openj-gate.com
Publication division of American chemical society : www.pubs.acs.org
Bilingual website on geography : http://www.cybergeo.eu/
Technical and scientific translation requires precision and above all the right term. It is all the more important to find the correct term from a dependable source. Often translators loose a lot of time looking for a justifiable choice. Happy searching!

MIT openwarecourse

Michel Drucker is a very popular and well respected T.V anchorman in France. Every Sunday he hosts a programme called “Vivement Dimanche prochain”. It’s a kind of a talk show with celebrities and entertainers including book and movie reviews. While watching the programme, I got a very interesting piece of news, namely the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has opened up a host of its courses online. One can freely access thousands of course content offered by this prestigious Institute. Here’s the link:
mitopencourseware. By entering keywords such as translation studies, linguistics etc. it is possible to read up the course contents, handouts and even solve exercises.

Wordnet

I heard about Wordnet during a seminar in the University some 18 months ago. Since then I have been using the window version of this incredible search tool. It’s handy, fast and user-friendly. The following link leads to the online search page. The homepage provides a downloadable version for both linux and window os.
wordnet