Leonardo Fontenelle

Today I’m not going to write about anything.

Today is my wedding day!

Umberto Eco is best know as the writer of The Name of the Rose, but he also happens to be a respected semiotician and linguist and a prolific essayist. After writing about software translation dilemmas, I discovered Umberto Eco’s book on the translation process: Mouse or Rat? Translation as negotiation (in Italian: Dire quasi la stessa cosa: Esperienze di traduzione). This isn’t, in fact his first book on the subject. It’s the result of his experience as a translator, as a translated author, and as translation manager. He doesn’t try to write “a theory of translation”, but rather approaches a series of problems faced by translators. The book name comes from the concept that, in the translation process, one always looses something in exchange for something else. He says translation is about possible worlds. The translated work ought to produce the same effects (semantic, syntactic, stylistic, metrical, symbolic …) the original did, but to some extent all translations would be unfaithful to the original. Umberto Eco also discusses the intersemiotic translation, the adaptation of art works from a medium to another (paintings, movies, music etc.). That’s why, according to a review (in Portuguese), the book should interest not only writers, translators and researchers, but also anyone involved in theater, cinema, music etc. adaptation.

If you use GNU/Linux, BSD (Mac OS X included) or another UNIX-like OS, keep an eye on updates from the time zone and daylight saving time database. Also called zoneinfo or tz, this database is responsible for telling a computer when to adjust the clock for daylight saving time (DST) (Wikipedia article). The database was last released this August 20, but recently got a recent update on daylight saving times for Brazil, Egypt, Gaza, Iran and Venezuela. In Brazil we are about to start a new DST, so whe need to update to the next timezone-data version as soon as it’s released! Contrary to most countries, in Brazil DST starts and ends in different days every year; we can’t possibly know when will DST start next year, simply because it wasn’t decided yet! Computers hate it. If you use Windows, Palm OS etc., chances are you’ll have to adjust the clock twice as frequently: when the DST starts/ends, and when the computer thinks it starts/ends. Free software can be diffent, but for that we need really updated DST information.

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