Publication!

I am very pleased to announce that Trestle Press has accepted Speaking of Murder for publication.

After three years of writing the story of Linguistics Professor Lauren Rousseau, I've succeeded in getting my book into the eager hands of the reading public. Who said persistence doesn't pay off?

The book will be out in a couple of weeks as an e-book in several formats, then will be released in print about two months later. I'm thrilled! This gorgeous cover is thanks to Elizabeth Thomsen for the photograph of Ipswich's Choate Bridge and fellow writer Polly Iyer for the design. Thank you, talented professionals.

Stay tuned for details. And many thanks, Trestle Press. Readers, stop by and see what else they have to offer.

Machine Translation: Potential for Crime?

My friend Karin posts on Facebook in Swedish. This makes sense. She's Swedish. I amuse myself by reading her posts out loud and trying to figure out what she's saying. I've studied German, which is, if not a sister language, then certainly a kissin' cousin of Swedish.

For example, she recently wrote: "Det blir ju inget varmvatten när man har luftvärmepump! Antingen får jag elda lite för att kunna ta en dusch, eller helt enkelt gå o träna för då ingår dusch. Kan man duscha på gymet utan att ha tränat först? Kan man se matinköp som träning?"

I read it. Hmm. Something about 'wind warm pump'. 'Dusch' sounds a little like 'douche,' 'shower' in French. 'Kan man' sounds like 'Kann man...' in German: 'Can one...? Then my friend Tim M ran it through Google Translate, getting the following results:

"It'll no hot water when you have a heat pump! Either I get burned a bit in order to take a shower, or simply go o work out for the shower included.
Can you take a shower at the gym without having practiced first? Can you see food shopping as exercise?"

This is fun. I was right about the "Can one...?" and "shower." But look at the grammar and fractured English in the automatic translation. Swedish and English are pretty closely related. Can't Google the Great do any better than that?

Then imagine the potential for international criminals sending messages with machine translation, and what a forensic linguist could do with that. Ahh, says the writer, rubbing her hands together in anticipation. So much material, so little time...

Do you have experience with automatic translation gone bad, or even human-produced results misunderstood?

Welcome

Reporting in from Ipswich, Massashusetts, with Blog Number One. Welcome! 

I'll be writing weekly on topics pertaining to my Speaking of Murder mystery series: writing, Linguistics, video forensics, the Society of Friends, and small-town life in New England. And whatever else comes to mind. I appreciate your dropping in here, and would love to hear your comments on any posting. Feel free to pass the link along, too.

A note of thanks to all my writer friends who blog regularly and who have provided a model of how to do this. Thanks, too, to Allan and John David, my very excellent sons, who blog with insight, clarity, and humor about life weekly (or more often).