(no subject)

[fj]

Reading two entries from friends today who got impacted by the JK Rowling Marketing Hype Machine doing work for the Braille end of publishing, I was struck with quite the geeky thought: while I am sure the colloquial and official terms for creating a Braille edition of a book is 'translating', I have worked with various forms of marked up text so much that I would call it 'reencoding' or 'transcoding'. After all, you aren't switching languages, just character sets. Then I started wondering about how punctutaion is handled exactly (pretty darn complicated), which led me to do some actual Googling, and found that the verb most used on the web is 'transcription'.

Comments

[bitty.livejournal.com]

i've always encountered "transcribing" and "embossing" as the terms used. then again, i had to do both of those things on a regular basis.

[fj.livejournal.com]

'Embossing' seems so focussed on the final mechanical aspect.

[magid.livejournal.com]

Last night I found out how fractions are done in Braille, and now I'm wondering how they deal with exponents and such...

Why, yes, I am a math geek.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Interests in various fields related to your (previous) job(s) is not geekery.

IOW, you may be one, but I am not convinced.

[jered]

I have a friend who is both blind and a geek, and who has informed me of the many horrors of Braille. It's an ugly, ugly standard... one worthy of Microsoft. Use of contractions (that is, macros), for example, is both mandatory and ambigious during reading, and the specific macro choices are bizarrely random. The use of escape characters for switching modes are wretched. It's really nasty all around.

[fj.livejournal.com]

Sounds like English.

I saw him at your reception, but I didn't have a chance to talk to him.

[feste-sylvain.livejournal.com]

Shouldn't the proper term be "transliteration"?

[xlerb.livejournal.com]

When I got about halfway through that post I thought of "transcription". As in DNA → RNA, as opposed to translation as in ribosomes. So it was a little... maybe not fully surprising but at least interesting to see that word when I got to the end.