Diacritiques

Update 3: To make this perfectly clear, there is no deadline. As long as the translated posts were published in June 2006.

Hell and damnation! I hate it when that happens — and this was indeed a bad time for things to go awry. No I didn’t forget the Carnival of Blog Translation, which I’ve agreed to host for the month of June. I’ve just been horribly snowed under with my new job and moving to the pleasant suburb of Brixton. So not only did I find myself too sleepy to blog, I even missed posts going missing and all but the most egregious server problems. Because there’ve been some.

Update 1: This post, too, is affected. It seems it’s up now — at least I hope so.

Be that as it may, I am horribly, horribly late for the June edition, which Angelo/Caelestis at Sauvage Noble so kindly suggested that I host. No; Liz Henry’s excellent initiative deserves better.

Still, all is not lost, maybe, and June’s not really quite finished yet, if you squint. So Bi- and Multilingual Bloggers of All Countries, Unite! Here are the rules:

1. Choose a blog post written in June 2006 and get permission to translate it. You can choose one of your own.
2. Translate it.
3. Post it on your blog.
4. All topics and language combinations are welcome.
5. Notify me, either by leaving a comment or trackback here, or by email to chris AT lascribe POINT net, or by Technorati-tagging your post. The notification should include: The URL, title and author’s name of the original post (in the source language), your name and blog URL, the URL and title of your translation.

Technorati-tagging? Like so: add this code to the end of your post, and I’ll automatically see it:

<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnivalofblogtranslation" rel="tag">carnivalofblogtranslation</a> or, if you prefer,
<a href="http://www.technorati.com/tag/carnival_of_blog_translation" rel="tag">Carnival of Blog Translation</a>

The deadline is

Sunday, the 32nd of June 2006 at 23:99

(whichever your time zone).

Update 2:Liz Henry herself has come through wonderfully. Read her translation of Yuyu’s post Tormentas de verano: Music, roses, and thunderstorms. To be read while listening to Paula and Odile’s very beautiful Coplilla de la rosa amarilla.

But in fact, I’ll post whatever comes in, even later. I’ll do two translations myself, to make up for my tardiness. And if I fail to give satisfaction as a hostess, I’ll accept 100 lashes with a Unicode string as a punishment.

Ce billet est une contribution à la première édition du « Carnaval de la traduction » initié par Liz Henry. J’ai choisi de transposer dans un français j’espère à peu près compréhensible un billet du professeur Ed Felten de l’université de Princeton aux États-Unis. Son blog, Freedom to Tinker (cela donne « La liberté de bidouiller ») se tient dans les interstices entre le droit et l’informatique.

Alors qu’en France, l’Assemblée nationale considère une loi qui, bien que transposant une directive européenne, reprend plusieurs dispositions du DMCA américain, les États-Unis sont en train d’aller plus loin. Le Congrès débat actuellement d’un projet de loi qui, au-delà de la protection des dispositifs GDM (également appelés DCU ou DRM), vise à boucher ce qu’ils appellent le « trou analogique » (« analog hole ») : la possibilité de copier un enregistrement numérique potentiellement protégé en passant par les techniques analogiques. Voici ce qu’Ed Felten a découvert à ce sujet…

(P.S.: Je suis autorisée à traduire ce billet car Ed Felten l’a mis à disposition sous contrat de licence Creative Commons. Merci.)

NDLT :

[1]: Noms des rapporteurs. [2]: L’acronyme VEIL signifie « voile ».

The project that has been maturing for a while is finally going public: this blog is getting a makeover, with new name and a new layout.

The old design was seriously going on my nerves — it was time for a change. For the new one, I started from the idea of privileging legibility, with a simple one-column design and a lot of whitespace. The result is what you’re looking at.

This one should also behave better in Internet Explorer, though unsurprisingly it looks prettier in modern, standards-compliant browsers (Firefox or Opera, Safari etc.).

There are a number of small improvements: my lists of linguabloggers (cyberlings) and dictionaries on pages of their own, a better archive, a first implementation of bilingual titles, the tag cloud, summaries for monolingual posts in the feeds (RSS2.0 [en] — RSS2.0 [fr]) … and as a special treat, David Romano’s plugin for entering phonetic characters in comments, after an idea by Eric Bakovic. Yeah, as if this blog had so many commenters who absolutely need to use IPA — but who could resist such a fantastic thing! I fiddled with the embedding a bit, and will probably go on experimenting with how to best use it.

If there are any problems with the new site, please do point them out.

Should you prefer the old look to the new one, it is still there, and you can switch back and forth between them (old layout — new layout ).

As for the new name, my thanks go to Kozlika, the godmother (or good fairy, take your pick) of the French blogosphere and an all-around great person, who went through a list of terms and wordplays with me and came up with the right one. “Serendipity” was a bit of a leftover from when I started out dipping a toe into this blogging thing, not really knowing where I wanted to take it. This is a blog about language, written and spoken, about writing and linguistics as far as my capacities go, and the name should allude to this. It also needs to work both in English and in French. There’s diacritic in there, a bit of critique, and discrimination, too, in the sense of telling things apart and thus seeing more distinctly.

Most importantly, more regular posting is hereby resuming, if nothing major prevents it.

Update, a few hours later: Oops, sorry, I didn’t really actually do the switch-over when I published this. Now it should be fine.

Via Language Hat, I just read about a brilliant initiative launched by Liz Henry at ALTAlk Blog: a Carnival of Blog Translation. A blog carnival is, as Liz puts it, “sort of like a travelling signpost that points to a bunch of magazine articles. It is a post that contains links to other posts written […]

I spent a very pleasant day yesterday having lunch with Suw Charman (in whose IRC channel#[1] I like to hang out), Kevin Anderson of BBC World Have Your Say and Matt Mullenweg (the WordPress lead developer). They are in Paris for the Les Blogs 2 conference. The local welcome committee included Michel Valdrighi (who took […]

From Anggarrgoon: I was contacted today [on a recipients suppressed list] by email by a fairly large publisher who was drawing my attention to some articles with a linguistic theme on their site. They were suggesting that I post links to their site. It’s an interesting type of product placement. I will be intrigued […]

I’ve played around with anagrams of my name before, and even had “A Chisel Writing” in the tagline for a while. But now Jean Véronis takes the name-anagram fun one step further with his pen-name generator. (Yes, in French, but you won’t have any problems figuring out how to work it.) Unlike the previous anagrams, these […]

Tom Reynolds, who blogs at Random Acts of Reality about being an emergency medical technician in east London, has been on BBC Scotland talk radio (see also this post). The Real Media file of the segment he was on is here, for a few more days. The programme talks about potential problems that might arise when […]

Bloggers, this seems to be an emerging tradition, do some navel-gazing once in a while. Why do I blog? What do I blog? Where does blogging lead me? Who reads me? I have tried to avoid this, which I find difficult because I tend to do a lot of this sort of introspection. Still, I […]

Eric Bakovic, one of the linguists who make Language Log the great, inspiring place it is, has started his own linguistics blog, phonoloblog | all things phonology. The contributors are, again, linguists and are going to address phonology in particular. This promises to be a very interesting addition to the linguistic segment of the blogospere. Plus, […]