Comma thoughts or the second child

 

Written language or, more specifically, its rules, is a matter of history and culture. All languages began as oral only. At some point, sooner or later, scholars transposed the words into pronunciation symbols (e.g., Western languages) or pictograms (e.g., Chinese). The timing and manner vary from country to country and language to language. This transposition of the spoken language includes the natural sound stops that serve to render oral speech clear in meaning and easy to understand. In written language, the pauses primarily take the form of periods and commas. Most interestingly, in English, end stop (.) usage rules have remained rather rigid while the use of the comma is rather intuitive and thus subject to disagreement and often raise the wrath of automated grammar checkers. Thus, I often ignore their mistake warnings and apply common sense instead of rules.

English, similar to its Germanic stepfather, has rather strict rules for the use of end stops. Specifically, the period marks the end of a sentence and a whole number sequence. See: I paid $20,000.75 in taxes last year. Some abbreviations require periods, notably Latin terms (e.g.) and initial letters of a name (H. G. Wells). There is a slight difference in British vs American usage in regard to the requirement for a period after titles and certain abbreviations, e.g., Mr, Mrs and Ltd in the UK are Mr. Mrs. and Ltd., in the United States, respectively. The vast majority of both native and non-native writers of English have no problem applying these rules.

However, the comma is a completely different story and involves interpretation as much as rules. To clarify, the comma represents the spoken pause taken to make a sentence easier to understand or indicate that a given part is less important. Thus, the spoken sentence “as I was telling you [pause] my cousin [pause] the one that just got engaged [pause] is coming to visit” becomes "As I was telling you, my cousin, the one that got engaged, is coming to visit". An infamous example of a comma-dependent text is "Crocodiles don’t swim here" as compared to "Crocodiles, don’t swim here" or its equally amusing family version of Let’s eat grandmother. The pauses and, therefore, the commas are required to ensure easy compression and create a certain hierarchy of ideas, i.e., distinguish the main idea from the additional information.

However, clarity is a case-specific criterion. Take, for example, the debate over the Oxford comma, the comma placed before the word “and” in lists. In most cases, its presence or absence has no effect on meaning or ease of understanding. Compare I need to buy bread, oil and tomatoes with I need to buy bread, oil, and tomatoes. However, in some cases, the extra comma does change the meaning. Compare "I love my parents, Batman and Robin" with "I love my parents, Batman, and Robin". It is possible to interpret the first sentence to mean that the parents are named Batman and Robin. In other words, in the vast majority of cases, English neither requires nor forbids a comma before the word and.

Ease of reading is also subjective. When the writer changes the order of supporting phrases or clauses, commas sometimes become necessary but personal choice can enter. For example, I would help if I had the time means the same as If I had the time, I would help. Apparently, in the second sentence, it is accepted practice to help the reader understand the location switch by placing a comma after the dependent clause. Likewise, dependent phrases at the beginning of a sentence are set off by commas. See: Some weeks ago, I noticed a change. Clearly, the comma helps the reader grasp the sentence more easily. By contrast, does this issue exist in comparing On Sundays, I go to church and On Sundays I go to church? The rule imposes a comma but I have no issue with the unpaused second version

As for hierarchy, the issue appears on complex sentences. The two sentence elements are of equal importance but some rules insist on a comma between them even when clarity or ease of reading is not involved. Consider: I wanted to go to the dance but nobody invited me. In my view, both elements are vital for the meaning of the sentence and should not be separated by a comma. That is true even for longer sentences: The company has decided to issue a dividend to the stockholders as its profits were much higher than expected. I see no issue with clarity or reading ease if the writer omits to put a comma after the word "stockholder".

These examples illustrate my complaint with automated language checkers. They apply formal language rules and warn me of my “errors”. I personally use Grammarly to QA my writing but reject most of its punctuation suggestions as irrelevant or even incorrect. I happen to have the knowledge to intelligently decide to accept or reject. However, many of the users of these programs are non-native writers and trust these tools blindly. You could say that users should apply careful judgment when using all automated tools, including AI. However, we all know that the gap between should and do is even farther than the gap between spoken and written language.

It is well known that most parents are far more flexible, i.e., lenient, with the second child than they were for their first child. Similar, the use of end stops in English writing is rather clear while the use of commas is a bit inconsistent and case-sensitive as least as far as I can see. You are allowed to disagree with machine-based language checkers. Common sense should rule punctuation also.

Bomb shelter culture – A silver lining

 

One of the themes of my blog posts is culture in its widest sense. Today’s post is about a special type of culture, one that has become unfortunately far too common and international, specifically the culture of people living with the need to run to bomb shelters at any moment. Most curiously enough, its extremity often brings out the best of people as I am experiencing.

For those who are unaware, as I am writing this post, millions of Christians, Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, Jews, and atheists live with the reality that they not only may but probably will have to run to a bomb shelter at any time in the near future, including in one minute. I personally have run to the shelter 4 times in the last 10 hours. These people are located in Kiev, Tel Aviv, Tehran, Doha, Beirut and Kuwait City, to name only a few. The threat danger may be from a 50 kilo or a 1000 kilo warhead. Warning time may range from seconds to minutes or even none. The nearest safe shelter may be in a reinforced room in the house but may be, more often than not, the bathroom or the stairwell when the public shelter is too far to be relevant or non-existent. Some people even sleep in underground railroad stations or parking lots. What all these people share in common is the utter lack of control over the frequency and timing of these threats.

The easiest part to cope with is the physical aspect. People learn to prepare for the siren. The “shelter bag” with water, snacks, reading material and activities for children waits ready by the door. People sleep with the maximum amount of clothing possible to minimize time spent on getting sufficiently dressed if they have to leave their house. Upon hearing the siren, after a few times, people make themselves minimally presentable, round up the children, grab the bag and go to the safest area. With practice, they even do so calmly, at least externally. It becomes a routine. It is amazing what people can get used to. The vast majority of people learn to function in this potentially deadly situation.

The hardest part of the routine is mental. The possibility of the need to run to the shelter dominates thinking. Success in taking a shower without having to run out wet is a victory. (I was caught in the shower a few days ago). Making a meal without having to turn off the gas in the middle is a relief. Shopping becomes a sprint. Despite the fatigue caused by the lack of continuous sleep, it even becomes difficult to fall asleep as someone one expects to hear an alarm the minute the eyes close. For those with small children, it involves not only the effort of keeping the children occupied , but also constant effort to emit a feeling of “all is under control” when it isn’t. For those with older family members with limited mobility, even getting them to the shelter requires patience and fortitude as these people simply cannot hurry or may not be able to access a shelter at all. All this effort creates intense emotional stress.

What I found amazing is that the situation brings out the best in people, just as it did during the Blitz in England during WW2. In my neighborhood, a bunch of small apartment houses surrounds an underground bomb shelter, which is also a Beit Knesset (synagogue). As such, it has proper seating and air conditioning, which is relative luxury, but it has stairs, making it difficult or impossible for some older people to access it. For the last week or so, the residents of the surrounding housing have gathered several times a day, including in the middle of the night, to spend anywhere from fifteen minutes to two hours together. The residents include people of all ages, colors, economic situations, and levels of religious faith. Younger people help older people go down stairs and assist mothers to lower buggies into the shelter. Neighbors that have not spoken to each other or refused to do so now converse pleasantly. People politely tell overly loud children to keep their voice down or smokers not to smoke at the entrance of the shelter or even consciously choose to ignore it, even though children’s voices at high volume and cigarette smoke can be extremely annoying in a small space. Previously important issues of disagreement are, for the moment, less relevant now. If it weren’t for the Hebrew, you might think the scene is in England.

This is my personal experience but I tend to think it significantly represents the experience of many of those stuck in the current rounds of violence, wherever they may be. The challenge of trying to lead a life under the constant threat of bombardment transcends politics; it makes no difference who started or who is responsible for the war; there will never be any consensus on that matter. On the other hand, I as an Israeli can easily imagine how the resident of Tehran or Kiev feels as this experience is universal with minor local differences. Most curiously, this danger brings out the humanity in most people, reducing the importance of many differences. We all want to live. Human beings do best when they cooperate. War is an awful way to remind us of that truth. Hopefully, this round of destruction will end soon worldwide. All we want is certainty and a normal life. In the meantime, you can say, as Dickens did, that it is worst of times and, in a certain sense, the best of times.

Coping with change – The Proz.com "What now? webinar event

 

The only constant in life is change, meaning that the only matter we control is our approach. My last post addressed the ITA conference on AI, which discussed its technical elements. This week, Proz.com hosted a 3.5-hour series of lectures on how to cope with a rapidly changing business environment and make the current transportation an opportunity, not a threat. The lecturers specifically discussed translation and interpretation but their message would be relevant to most professions today. As a rule, I try to take three “lessons” from any conference. From the excellent presentations in this event, I gleaned three key messages: the importance of flight (not running away); the process for smart diversification; and the practicality for constant improvement. All three tips mentally ease the process of adapting to a dynamic world and make the challenge far less daunting.

Joachim Lépine in his presentation discussed three ways to cope with declining income: "Walk away, dance... or fly?”. Specifically, he expressed his complete understanding of those that choose to take on a salary position in another industry because freelance translating is not paying the bills anymore. He also related to those that have gone full AI and reinvented themselves in terms of how they work. Most interestingly, he suggested that this moment, because of its chaotic nature, is an ideal time to try out any path that may seem exciting, whether or not it is related to one’s linguistic occupation. A combination of soft skills and enhanced interest can lead to a new source of income. Joachim referred to this as “flying” as the choice of the actual activity was not limited to the current choice of profession but involved seeking a potentially liberating occupational goal. As an additional bonus, his presentation excelled despite or because of the lack of any accompanying slides. Flying is neither staying the course nor switching direction but instead examining options.

The lecturer that followed him, David Higbee-Teves, discussed Japanese business concepts and how they apply to the current freelance translation market. One of his points was that the Japanese companies tend to diversify into fields for which they already have the required skills and facilities. Instead of risking limited resources in an unknown field, they analyse their competitive advantages and seek additional products and services that use the skills they possess. For example, in translation, it requires little additional training for a translator to become an editor of texts produced by machine translation or AI or even a copywriter as all the occupations demand similar linguistic skills. I recently took such a step, beginning to work with a young attorney to improve his English, which utilized both my teaching and legal background. Despite some initial uncertainty about my capability, we are both learning and enjoying the experience. Thus, diversifying into related fields is a relatively risk-free way of expanding one’s income.

Another Japanese business wisdom shared by David Higbee-Teves was the effect of continuous improvement. AI is being touted as the cure-all for all business processes but has yet to prove itself financially and functionally on a large scale. In simple words, some people claim that AI will completely replace human translation. However, in practice, creating the AI prompts to produce even a decent translation requires skill in prompting and does not always reduce human time and effort. By contrast,  a series of small but easy to apply improvements in the efficiency in standard business tasks can make a significant difference in productivity. The concept is to use AI to reduce 10- or 15-minutes tasks to 5 minutes or less. Several of these steps together will significantly increase the amount of time the linguist (or any other professional) has to apply to money-making tasks that require human thinking. These tasks could include intake of new orders, invoicing, quoting, and standard email communication, to name a few. The time involved in any single activity is minor but accumulates rapidly over a day or week. The professional linguist can use this time for production, marketing, continuing education or simply enjoying life. Improvement is a continual process, not a one-time activity.

Thus, in the face of an unclear future, professionals need clear vision in order to make correct decisions. The Proz.com event provided numerous relevant tips for linguists, ones that are also applicable to many types of professionals. With a handful of methods in hand, it becomes easier to adjust to current trends and find an effective match between market needs and individual strengths. Even more importantly, the unknown becomes less frightening and more interesting in a positive way. Professionals do control how they react to change even if they do not control the change itself.

Speaking of an uncertain world, as I post this, the residents of Israel, including myself, as well as those in Persian Gulf countries, Jordan, and now Lebanon, not to mention the people of Iran, live in great uncertainty and under constant fear. I can tell you with firsthand knowledge that the random and frequent need to run to a bomb shelter at any time of the day or night is one of the most distressful experiences one can have. Thus, I hope that very soon, in a few days hopefully, the people of the Middle East will wake up to a peaceful, more stable world where nobody calls for the destruction of any other nation or people. I am realistic enough to know that such tranquility will not occur immediately but we need to "fly", build on the changes that occurred and take constant small steps. 

AI and the translation industry – the 2026 Israel Translators Association Conference

 

[AI image]

“People out of my industry love to tell me how AI has eliminated my profession…” one lecturer said. Today, it seems that the most commonly known “fact” about being a translator is that it is no longer necessary. After three days of lectures at the 2026 ITA conference, it is possible to clarify that the reports of our death have been greatly exaggerated. Granted, AI is transforming the process and business of translation but that statement applies to numerous professions. For three days, the attendees gain a wide-angle perspective not only on the potential impact of AI but also how to use it for their own advantage. The quality of these lectures was exceptionally high but certain speakers stood out, in my opinion, in terms of the practicality of their approach. It should also be noted that the presentations as a group provided a roadmap or at least a guiding flashlight of how to proceed into the uncertain future.

While the topic, AI and translators, was narrow, the approach was all-encompassing. Some lecturers focused on the actual methods of using AI, showing prompts and approaches in various AI programs,  while others presented their method of using it in certain fields, including technical and creative writing. Two translation teachers detailed how they instruct their students how to use AI properly in order to attain the best possible translation. Another series of lectures dealt with the ethics and security problems posed by AI, an important factor for many translators. Many speakers discussed the need for translators to change their role from converters of languages to language/culture experts. Finally, a few, including myself, had the chutzpah to talk about non-AI translation matters, just to relieve the AI-created tension if you will. The conference provided a multi-perspective survey of the AI-translation scene.

Having attended many conferences, I can say that the quality of the lecturers and lectures was outstanding. Three presentations stand out, one for each day. Naomi Shenkar in her presentation entitled “ Prompt Engineering for Translation” was not only organized but provided a clear and simple approach to writing prompts and efficiently achieving the most relevant results. I plan to put her method to the test very soon. The star of the second day was Danny Verbov with this presentation “Your Greatest Marketing Tool is Right Under Your Nose!” Not only did he remind everybody that it is important to market yourself if you want business, regardless of your knowledge of AI, and how to do so efficiently and effectively, but he also had, in my estimation, the most effective and humorous PowerPoint slides. His pictures were worth a thousand words. They were pure added value to his well-executed lecture. Finally, on the last day, Orly Kyram gave a workshop on “Getting to know Gemini and NotebookLM In Depth”, a valuable hands-on experience for those lacking the courage and faith to learn by trial and error. As I said, the other lecturers were also quite effective and relevant. I am just presenting my personal three favorites.

It may be difficult to remember any specific points after three days of AI overdosing but three messages are clear. A translator that fails to apply AI where applicable will be replaced by one that does. That said, effective AI requires well-thought-out prompts and human editing. A simple command does not produce a professional translation. Finally, AI does not reduce the requirements of the profession. Translators still need to know how to transmit the message, linguistic and cultural, of the source language into the target language and convince customers that language makes a difference. AI, just like all previous machine translation technologies, is merely a tool, not a replacement for human thinking. Alas, it will take time before translation buyers realize that AI “good enough” is not good enough. In the meantime, translators are not in danger of extinction.

As a final point, many young professionals, including translators, do not see the value in professional organizations. The ITA once again organized and brought together a large and varied group of excellent professionals, who enriched the perspective of all the attendees. This event alone justified the membership cost. Add the energy and synergy of group interaction. I strongly recommend the benefits of joining professional associations. At a minimum, you can hear colleagues who are still alive and well in your profession and learn from them. Next year in Tel Aviv.

The beginning and end of it – the meal – of course names

 

In elegant or at least expensive dining, one main dish will not suffice. The meal needs a prologue and epilogue, as they say in theatre, to create a complete experience. However, the magic of the culinary art requires appropriate names for these extra dishes that start and complete the feast. The origins of this gastronomical nomenclature paint a picture of the development of food.

Upon sitting down at an elegant restaurant, diners enjoy a small but tasty dish to awaken their appetite. For this reason, some English speakers refer to them as appetizers. Other cultures merely note the timing, i.e., before the meal. Thus, Italians call it antipasto, which sounds anti-carbohydrate but means “before the meal” and highlights vegetables, and Yiddish speakers call it a forchpeiz, meaning before the meal. Granted, those two nationalities are not referring to the exact same dishes. The classic French word entrée got lost in translation in the US as the dish that one received upon “entering” the meal became the main dish in the United States, maybe because the Americans were not that keen on multicourse meals in the past. A classic American Sunday brunch clearly illustrates the chaos in the choice and order of the foods. At home, the French call it hors d’oeuvre, which literally means “outside the work”, implying that the addition of an opening dish was originally not an integral part of meal. The use of the term first course shows it truly was a burden on the kitchen staff as they had to “run” to bring the food on time and still hot from distant kitchens. Hebrew has two options, both quite concrete: mana rishona, first dish or mana pticha, opening dish. Arabic takes another approach, using the word mezza to describe a wide assortment of shared salads intended to create a social environment but often having the unintended result of filling up the stomachs of the guests. Linguistically and culinarily speaking, there are many ways to start a meal.

When dining out, the dessert is the dish that leaves the most lasting impression. However, somehow the name of the course does not do it proper service. The English term dessert is derived from the French word to clean the table. Likewise, the German Nachtisch means “after the table”, eliciting the picture of an almost empty but slightly stained tablecloth at a restaurant after the dishes from the main course have been cleared. By contrast, the root of the Hebrew word kinuach is “to clean” because dessert cleans the palate. Another English term for the last course is sweets, a view that the Italians share with their il dolce. Of stranger origin is the English term pudding, which originally referred to sausages, both sweet and savory, from a French word brought to English by those charming Normans. With the invention of the pudding cloth in the 17^th century, according to Wikipedia, it was no longer necessary to cook the ingredients in an animal’s stomach, which led to a wide variety of English sweet puddings.

I hope that these facts have opened up your appetite for food and its nomenclature. To borrow the concept from Gertrude Stein, the opening dish, regardless of its name, is meant to open up your appetite. My mother used to say “L’appétit vient en mangeant”, meaning that starting to eat makes you hungry even if you didn’t know you were. As for the last course, being full or overweight is irrelevant to the issue: a tasty, sweet bite is a perfect end of the meal, whatever you eat or call it. Enjoy both if you can.

 

Say what or the joy of trying to understand extreme accents in foreign languages

 

Most people in the world are exposed to a second language. Some are fortunate enough to live in a place where many languages are spoken while others have to learn an additional language in a more formal way at school. Regardless of how well they are exposed to a foreign language, people always have less confidence in their knowledge of it relative to their mother tongue. There is no method more certain to feed that doubt than to visit a place where people speak a version of the foreign language so different from what they learned that it is hard to understand. The failure to understand immediately raises the question whether this incomprehension is a result of poor knowledge or the “weird” manner of speaking. Almost every language has these outliers, including French, Spanish, Arabic and English. The cause of the local uniqueness may be historical, linguistic, geographic or any combination of these. The difficulty posed by these variants makes being a translator far easier than being an interpreter in terms of language knowledge.

Even after the advent of radio and television, devices that shattered geographical language barriers, every area, whether a village, city, province or country, has its own vocabulary and way of pronouncing words to one degree or another. In some cases, the resulting dialect is so different from the standard language that even non-local native speakers struggle to understand it. For example, the Picard dialect in northern France sounds like French but only “sort of” due to its strange syntax. Of all of the Spanish variants, Chilean Spanish combines rapid speech with missing syllables and local vocabulary, a deadly combination. As for Arabic, putting aside Moroccan Arabic, which is a language in itself, Bedouin Arabic is beyond the ability of most non-native speakers to understand due to its different pronunciation of certain sounds, among other reasons. The English language enjoys a myriad of accents, with among the most confusing existing in Scotland and the parts of the south in the United States. Even native speakers struggle to understand what the locals are saying. An encounter with any of these dialects will instill doubt in the most intrepid of language learners.

The source of these local language identities may be historical, i.e., it is a previous form of the language. For example, Church Slavonic is the old Orthodox Slavic language, which was retained in Church literary and speech even after the reform of the Russian language in the 18^th century. The Cajans or Acadians, who live in Louisiana, speak an old Breton French as part of their creole dialect as they left France several centuries ago. Old Anglo-Saxon speech survives in signs and the writings of Tolkien, who studied the language. It is possible to find bits and pieces of previous “versions” of language here and there.

A more common factor in a very local dialect is the presence of other languages in the area and among the population. French speakers in all of the colonies may use the French framework but freely integrate words from African or other native languages into their speech, including even Dutch in some northern areas of France. Berber, a non-Arabic language, makes its presence felt in North African Arabic. Spanish in South America borrows Indian words while English in many southwestern states in the United States steals terms from Spanish. Depending on the local ethnic mix, the main language develops its own style.

From another point of view, geographical isolation is a vital factor in differentiation. Where mountains or extreme geography limit contact with other cultures, languages develop in their own way. The heights of mountain ranges, the great distances of the oceans, the lengths of the desert and depths of the jungle cut off a language from its source and ultimately create a new one over time. The dialect becomes ever more distinct from the standard form.

This evolution creates challenges for linguists. For interpreters, this diversity means that knowing the standard version may not be sufficient to be able to understand the speaker. By contrast, written communication remains relatively standard over cultures. Official Russian from the Brezhnev era is not much different than the current form. For the foreign visitor under the impression that several years of language study in high school or college will ensure smooth linguistic sailing in foreign lands, it is a shock to experience total incomprehension. The only reaction to the flood of apparent gibberish is “say what”. However, to cheer up any bewildered foreign visitors to such areas, it is normal. It is not you. It’s them, at least from the visitor’s perspective.

On translation, fidelity and project choice

 

To non-linguists, translation seems a rather simple task, merely expressing the meaning of words in one language in another language. A solid knowledge of grammar and a comprehensive dictionary should suffice in faithfully rendering the content into a second language. However, in practice, the term “translation” encompasses a wide variety of text types, from the most technical to the most creative, and purposes, and from literal rendering to cultural equivalency. The significance is that the art of faithful translation involves a variety of approaches. For individual translators, these characteristics may define which projects they should accept.

The use of the term faithful as it applies to translation naturally poses the question “to what”. In some rare cases, the translator must rigidly reflect the form and content in the source language into the target language, mistakes and all. For example, a translation of a court deposition must show the level of language and evasiveness of the source text as these elements may have legal significance. For documents submitted to a foreign court, the translated text must be written in line with the accepted writing norms of the foreign court while fully reflecting the content of the original document, no more and no less. Medical documents, due to their potentially significant role in any lawsuit, must strictly reflect the content of the original but yet must be understandable to a reader of the target language. Marketing documents, including travel-related documents, must speak to their target audience, i.e., flow well in the second language, at the expense of the form of the original text while referring to the same factual elements. Finally, literary translation involves the art of expressing the uniqueness of a writer’s style and message into a second language, which may sometimes involve radical changes of the syntax and even details. For example, Umberto Ecco wrote in one of his essays that one scene whose core element was swearing in a holy city took on many different forms in its translations into various European languages in terms of city and actual curse in order to communicate the extremity of the act. Thus, the translators’ obligation to be faithful is far from straightforward.

As a result, translators approach each type of text differently. On the most basic level, a word-by-word translation with little consideration of syntax, as typical of some machine translations, involves little translator input but not a small amount of resoluteness as the resulting text sounds awful . However, when translators must render the content of the original text into the form of the target language, they must apply their knowledge of these forms to produce a natural-sounding document. When the genre lacks any prescribed form, the translator’s linguistic skills come to the fore as it is necessary to produce a seamless text, one that does not sound like a translation. Finally, in a literary translation, the linguist must reproduce all the nuances of the writer’s style, often when there is no direct equivalent in the target language. This translation tests not only the ability of the translator to identify the overt and hidden elements of the original but the creativity to find their equivalents in the second language. In each case, the translator calls on a different toolkit of skills.

Consequently, the ability to effectively translate all or many document styles is far from obvious. Personal tendencies, training and practice hone certain skills while bypassing others. Some translators are perfectly at ease handling the most technical texts due to their knowledge of the content and form but may produce the most unremarkable marketing text imaginable. By contrast, a translator with the ability and experience to successfully render the effect produced by one language into another language when given full rein may fail when required to follow strict rules of syntax and vocabulary, a result of that same creativity. Experienced professional translators know when the document involves a genre too far.

Thus, translation goes far beyond the formal knowledge of grammar and vocabulary and involves a comprehensive understanding of how to translate specific types of documents. Each genre has its approaches and challenges. Yet, the basic goal remains the same, i.e., to produce a faithful rendition of the original document into another document, however that fidelity is expressed.