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Then there’s “yinz.” It’s sold on T-shirts all over the city. It’s the Pittsburgh way to say “you all,” and Pittsburghers are oft referred to as Yinzers. The word is unique to the region, and while lots of folks claim to hate it, it’s still affectionately used by old-school, born and bred Pittsburghers, and you can still hear it casually spoken in everyday conversation throughout the city.
The city’s accent is too difficult to teach in one article, but here is a list of Pittsburghese words and a breakdown of what they mean to help welcome you to the city.
Aht = out
Self explanatory.
Buggy = shopping cart
As simple as that but said more authentically with a slight accent. “Go aht an' grab me a buggy.”
Chipped-Chopped Ham (chipped ham) = processed lunch meat made from ham pieces, trimmings, and spices.
Usually eaten on a sandwich, sometimes with barbecue sauce called “ham barbecue.”
Crik = creek
Used for just about any flowing body of water smaller than a river. “Just have the kids go play near the crik.”
Dahntahn = Downtown
“Yinz wanna go Dahntahn, n’at?”
Dippy = appropriate level for dipping into
Mostly used when ordering eggs over easy. “I’ll take an order of dippy eggs with some toast.”
Gumband = rubber band
Western Pennsylvania term. “There are extra gumbands in the top drawer.”
Jagoff = jerk
The best yinzer word that everyone can use without judgment. “Quit being a jagoff and let the car merge into the lane.”
Jeet jet = Did you eat yet?
Best said with such a thick accent that most people can’t understand you.
Jumbo = bologna lunch meat
Probably the preferred way to order bologna at the deli counter. “I’ll take one pound of jumbo, thinly sliced.”
N’at = and that
An oft-used extender to just about any sentence. “We were watching the Pirates and drinking beer, n’at.” Of course, like yinz, "and that" isn't even a particularly common phrase in standard English, but generally n'at is a more or less meaningless casual phrase to tag on to the end of a sentence, like "and whatnot." You also might see it as a bumper sticker, spelled "n@."
Nebby = nosy, prying
Used to describe your most gossip-loving coworker, primarily used when referring to personal, yet trivial details. “Stop being so nebby about my date last night.”
Pixburgh = Pittsburgh
Pittsburgh’s talk so fast, it often comes out pronounced as this. Millennials have adopted this spelling as an affectionate term on social media.
Pop = soft drink
Pittsburgh choosing pop is the equivalent of Penguins vs. Flyers and Sheetz vs. Wawa in Pennsylvania’s pop vs. soda war. Head east, and you’ll find the opposite.
Redd up = clean, tidy up
Used by old, yinzer parents when they want you to clean your room. “Your grandparents are coming over, so go upstairs and redd up your room.”
Slippy = Slippery
Simple and used all the time in winter. “Careful: The sidewalk is slippy.”
Sweeper = vacuum
Also, the verb "sweep" is used when vacuuming, which is a bit confusing when saying, “I emptied out the sweeper and swept the carpet.”
Yinz = you all
Also sometimes said as “Yinz guys.” Yinzers love yinz. Get used to it.
Hebe Uhart's drawing of a chimango bird, from Animals. Courtesy of Archipelago Books hide caption
Hebe Uhart's drawing of a chimango bird, from Animals.
Courtesy of Archipelago BooksOver the course of the coronavirus pandemic, I often have found myself using books — especially, but not only, books in translation — to satisfy my itch to travel. Increasingly, though, I find that tendency suspect. My favorite books may take me other places, but they also help me look more deeply into my own life and mind. Why should I give that opportunity up just because I feel stir-crazy? As a course-corrector, I have been seeking out books — again, translated and not — that serve desires other than wanderlust. All three of the ones below have made me very glad.
An I-Novel, by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter
An I-Novel, by Minae Mizumura, translated by Juliet Winters Carpenter Columbia University Press hide caption
A century before American and European writers began gravitating to autofiction en masse, Japanese novelists were writing confessional books known as shishōsetsu, or I-novels. Minae Mizumura's 1995 Shishōsetsu from right to left, written at a point when many readers and critics had grown tired of I-novels, updated the form in a remarkable way. Her book, which appears in English as An I-Novel, is bilingual. It toggles between English and Japanese, replicating the way Mizumura herself spoke, wrote, and thought during her adolescence and early adulthood in the United States. For years, she worried that the book's bilingual nature rendered it untranslatable into English, since, of course, translation makes An I-Novel monolingual. But through the simple-but-brilliant trick of putting Mizumura's original English text in bold, her translator, Juliet Winters Carpenter, permits the Anglophone reader to understand how ceaselessly and naturally Minae, the novel's protagonist, switches tongues.
Language is, unsurprisingly, central to An I-Novel's thematic concerns. Minae, a struggling doctoral candidate, is on the verge of quitting American academia and returning to Japan to be a writer. Her sister and confidante, Nanae, asks why she isn't considering writing in English; Minae feels she can't. She has never prioritized her English, since she resents it and sees it as a force of domination; still, she recognizes the "incomparable privilege" of writing in such a globally understood language. Mizumura is very sharp on such questions of privilege and identity, which she dissects with total lucidity. No idea seems too tangled or uncomfortable for her. She's an intellectual powerhouse, and Carpenter's chatty, fluid translation more than keeps up with her thinking. For readers intrigued by questions of globalization, literary politics, or translation An I-Novel is a complete must-read, but, no matter what your interests, this is not a book to be missed.
Animals, by Hebe Uhart, translated by Robert Croll
It is a bit of a truism — but also very true — that writing about niceness is easier than writing about ugliness. Hebe Uhart, one of Argentina's best-beloved fiction writers, excelled at the former. Uhart, who died in 2018, was an utter master of the gentle observation. Her work combines unsentimental affection with endless curiosity about the details of everyday life. In a lovely Paris Review tribute, the Chilean writer Alejandra Costamagna describes Uhart's vision as "[s]eemingly naïve but tremendously sharp." That duality is on excellent display in Animals, a collection of Uhart's sketches — verbal and pen-and-ink — of pets, zoo creatures, wild birds, and the "human animals," Uhart's preferred term, who love them.
Animals is at once tender, bemused, informative, and deeply fun. Some of its essays are simply collections of facts; others are glorified interview transcripts; others look at prior books about animals, mining them for helpful insights. But in every one, Uhart, as the narrator, "stands agape in contemplation" before some animal or other, marveling at meerkats' watchfulness or parrots' ability to communicate. Her humility and wonder are instantly endearing. They are also philosophically enviable. Animals is, in fact, a philosophical work. It asks, through sweet, respectful attention, how we might best relate to animals; how we humans, so accustomed to seeing ourselves as nature's rulers, might adjust our attitudes. For those not given to such thought, reading Animals could be a good start.
Catch the Rabbit, by Lana Bastašić, translated by the author
I should admit that I am often skeptical of self-translations. Translation is often like surgery, and is it the best idea, really, to operate on yourself? In the case of the Bosnian writer Lana Bastašić's very good debut Catch the Rabbit, which she translated from the Serbo-Croatian, I would say it was probably not the right choice. Bastašić's English prose can be odd, clunky, and over-adorned — but not so much that it gets in the way of her story. Her protagonist Sara, a Bosnian emigrant in Dublin, has no contact at all with her old life. She shuns her homeland entirely, wanting to forget its violence, but when her childhood friend Lejla calls to ask her for a ride to Vienna, Sara finds herself booking a flight.
Sara can't say no to Lejla. Nor can she permit herself to see the truth — and difficulty — of her friend's life. This seems to have always been the case. Sara is the Christian daughter of a police captain; Lejla comes from a Muslim family that, we come to understand, lived in terror for years. Still, Sara is committed to her childhood conviction that Lejla's charism makes her "full of herself, privileged and untouchable," though the reader knows Sara herself is the untouchable one. This irony undergirds the novel, which reveals itself to be a quietly tragic examination of the effect denial can have on even the deepest friendships. The events of the ending seem, ultimately, almost beside the point: No matter what happens in Sara and Lejla's present, their true connection frayed to nothing long ago.
Lily Meyer is a writer and translator living in Cincinnati, Ohio.
Vivaldi has released a major update for its eponymous web browser for privacy-minded power users. Version 4.0 bring with it a translation tool, along with beta versions of Vivaldi Mail, Calendar, and Feed Reader. The update is available now on Windows, Mac and Linux and Android devices.
Vivaldi built its translation feature into its browser. The tool is powered by Lingvanex, a Cyprus-based company that makes translator's for a wider range of platforms including voice calls and smartwatches. As part of its focus on privacy, Vivaldi says that all your translation activity will be kept away from third-parties on its servers in Iceland.
With the update, a new translate icon will appear in the desktop browser's address field when a web page loads. You'll be able to translate a full page to your default chosen language or use the drop-down menu to choose from other languages and additional options, including "never translate" and disable auto-translate. The feature is also available on Vivaldi's mobile browser via the menu.
In terms of the new beta features, Vivaldi Mail is arguably the biggest addition. The client can show you multiple accounts in a single inbox and works with providers that support IMAP and POP3, including Gmail. Vivaldi says it will do "the heavy lifting for you" by detecting mailing lists and automatically categorizing your mail to make it easier to find. You can also tweak the three-panel layout to a horizontal split view.
Vivaldi's Feed Reader, meanwhile, lets you follow RSS feeds, YouTube channels and podcasts with no "promoted content" or "spying." Finally, Vivaldi's Calendar is its alternative to Google and Microsoft's offerings. The new tool supports several online calendars like Fastmail, Zimbra and iCloud. You can also choose between three different views including minimal, full view and compact.
With so many new additions, Vivaldi is aware that some users may not want such a busy browser experience. So, it's debuting three layouts: Essential, which keeps things minimal; Classic, complete with panels and the status bar; and Fully Loaded for the complete range of features including its beta tools.
Alicia and Matt Lammers walk outside of their home in Deming, New Mexico. Bree Lamb hide caption
Alicia and Matt Lammers walk outside of their home in Deming, New Mexico.
Bree LambThis is Part 2 of the story of Alicia and Matt Lammers. You can find Part 1, Battle Rattle, here.
After their marriage, Alicia became Matt's official caregiver, supported by the Department of Veterans Affairs. With a stipend from the VA, Alicia was able to quit her full time job and focus entirely on Matt's recovery. Alicia felt that the role suited her and Matt — she found the work fulfilling and Matt trusted her.
Over time, Matt's deteriorating mental health threatened to destroy their marriage. What happens when you see a pattern in your partner's behavior, but telling anyone about it is a betrayal? Part 2 of the story of Matt and Alicia Lammers.
Listen to Rough Translation wherever you get your podcasts, including NPR One, Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Pocket Casts, Spotify, and RSS.
Researchers have long acknowledged that what comes out of a machine translation (MT) system is only as good as what goes in. Now, experts are asking whether the proliferation of MT is leading to less-than-ideal translations.
“Ten years ago, data contaminated with machine translation was a leading cause of bad translations,” ModelFront CEO and co-founder Adam Bittlingmayer told Slator. “The problem has only increased exponentially over the last decade.”
According to an April 2021 paper, “Documenting the English Colossal Clean Crawled Corpus,” “Fitting models on non-natural language can lead to issues in production.”
The authors, hailing from the University of Washington and the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence, wrote, “As the use of models which can generate natural language text proliferates, web-crawled data will increasingly contain data that was not written by humans.”
The authors examined patents.google.com to estimate the proportion of machine-generated text out there. They found that more than 10% of the patents in this corpus came from patent offices that require submissions in a language other than English.
Data and Research, Slator reports
44-pages on how LSPs enter and scale in AI Data-as-a-service. Market overview, AI use cases, platforms, case studies, sales insights.
The Google domain typically uses MT to translate those documents into English, while other physical documents have been scanned, run through optical character recognition (OCR), and then machine translated.
Natural language processing (NLP) doctoral researcher Bram Vanroy mused in an April 19, 2021 tweet, “Recent studies have shown that multilingual crawled datasets are noisy in terms of the languages that they contain. Has the same been done to check whether such corpora contain original text vs. MT or translationese? Maybe we’re all just training MT systems on…mostly MT.”
Vanroy’s tweet may refer in part to “Quality at a Glance: An Audit of Web-Crawled Multilingual Datasets,” a March 2021 paper resulting from the collaborative work of more than 50 authors at a range of institutions, including Google, Hugging Face, Intel Labs, and several universities.
In a manual audit of 205 language-specific corpora, researchers found issues in lower-resource corpora, and noted that “a significant fraction contains less than 50% sentences of acceptable quality.”
While the authors did not explicitly link these issues to MT, they did point out that the quality of automatically crawled and filtered datasets tends to be lower than that of hand-curated collections.
Data and Research, Slator reports
80-pages. Market Size by Vertical, Geo, Intention. Expert-in-Loop Model. M&A. Frontier Tech. Hybrid Future. Outlook 2021-2025.
“Our quantitative analysis reveals surprisingly low amounts of valid in-language data, and identifies systematic issues across datasets and languages,” the researchers said.
Bittlingmayer tweeted on April 20, 2021, “[Marcin Junczys-Dowmunt] has a theory that back-translation was accidentally implemented for xx→en a decade before it was invented and explains the edge over en→xx. From the error analyses I did in those days, it seems about right.”
He emphasized to Slator that it is important to distinguish between those two cases. “For example, when crawling the web for data to train a Spanish-to-English system, ingesting data that was machine-translated from English to Spanish even helps. In fact, that’s one of the key tricks that Google, Microsoft, and DeepL use today: back-translation.”
Junczys-Dowmunt said on Twitter, “It’s also likely far worse for xx<->yy. There you can assume that nearly everything is just MT.” In later tweets, he noted that language pairs such as Swedish–Korean are likely to depend on a pivot language due to the scarcity of human translators working in those languages.
“Unless it comes from actual multi-lingual sources, then it’s just all translationese,” Junczys-Dowmunt concluded.
Is your Russian feeling a little rusty? Not to worry, as an English translation for Fallout 2 mod Olympus 2207 has finally been released - so you can put the Russian dictionary down for now.
Olympus 2207 is a huge total conversion mod for Fallout 2 that was released back in December 2014, and at long last, it now has an official English translation (courtesy of Keyboard Gecko). Mod team Nebesa Games used Fallout 2's engine and basic mechanics to create a new story that's unconnected to the Fallout series: it adapts features like Fallout 2's skills and perks system, but adds new graphics, additional gameplay mechanics, and - of course - a bunch of new stories and quests. There's even a crafting system, a mini-game for hacking electronic panels, and a flexible structure with no main quest. "Do you want to become the tyrant of Radius, or do you want to improve the lives of everyone in it?," the official mod page explains. "The choice is yours!"
As explained in the lore section of the mod's website, the game takes place in the year 2207 in the Silicon Valley region of the US. The Great War of 2013 created an irradiated wasteland, and while some managed to escape into improvised shelters (or a luxurious vault called Livos), many had to "adapt to the new conditions on the evolutionary, genetic level". Sounds rough. Anyway, some lucky survivors found themselves inside a skyscraper called Olympus when this all went down. The game centres on this skyscraper, which everyone in the wasteland seems desperate to enter: it promises energy with its solar panels and protection from the horrors outside. If you can get past the guards at the bottom, however.
As for the quality of the translation, it seems to generally be pretty decent - I dipped my toe into the mod and found that while some sentences didn't sound entirely natural in English, you could still understand their meaning. The mod's also pretty easy to install: simply download and unzip the file to access the game set-up window and load the game. (It's worth noting that Olympus 2207 will overwrite your Fallout 2 game files when it installs, so make sure to back up any saves before you hit that install button.)
And if all this appeals to you, the good news is that the developers are working on a sequel: named Olympus 2249, the second instalment will introduce a "new protagonist, a new region, and new events." It was first announced back in 2017, but the developers still feel it's too early to reveal a release date for the sequel. For the time being the first game should provide plenty of entertainment, however, and you can find the download for Olympus 2207 over here.
