Monday, January 19, 2009

Translations Gone Bad & One for the Books

There was talk on Techwr-L about idiotic logic. Richard Hamilton spoke on the topic through the following post to the list, which I find hilarious.

My favorite falls into the category of bad translations. While traveling in China, I saw a hot air hand dryer ina men's room with the following text in English:
#*$& the hand machine
The expurgated text is in fact the in"f"amous word you might have guessed it was.

According to a native speaker of Chinese, the character for "dry" in Chinese ("gan"), when simplified (as the People's Republic does to many characters), looks like a character used in the Taiwanese dialect as slang for #*$&. Hence, "gan so ji" or "Dry the hand machine" (itself clunky, but otherwise uninteresting) becomes much more notable. Though this might have been an honest mistake, the connection with Taiwan makes me wonder if it wasn't a "plausibly deniable" political statement by the translator.
Richard Hamilton
Managing Writers: A Real World Guide to Managing Technical Documentation

His web site is http://xmlpress.net/managingwriters.html if you'd like to read more about his writings that are available.

In other less interesting news, I am finishing up three reviews tonight for submission to Dailyvault.com and, frankly, I'm really excited about them. Two of them deal with one of my favorite bands: Bayside. I find their lyrics and musicianship very appealing. Their approach to music is not technically amazing or anything like that. In fact, their music sounds like music anyone could write. I think that, perhaps, is what draws me to them. The vocals sound like heartaches, captured in time on digital media. I was going to write "on tape" but I don't think anyone actually records "on tape" anymore.

I wonder what basement bands do nowadays. In the glory days of when I played in bands, I always had a blank cassette tape ready for capturing whatever musical mischief came out of my parent's basement. I now have a lot of cassettes of me playing drums with various guitarists over the years. Honestly, a lot of it sucks. In 1989, I was in my first "real" band. We had a singer whom we never heard sing. I work with his dad now and was telling him this story the other day. He would come to rehearsal and say something like, "Yeah, man. I need to get a mic." Our bassist ditched us at least once to mow the grass instead of rehearse. The two guitarists often had trouble getting through songs and me? I wasn't that good on the drums. None of us were that good but we had the right attitude. We talked about renting a storage garage so we could "rehearse anytime we wanted!" and prepare for our first gig. At the time, the parish I belonged to had a church festival in the fall and we were convinced the band should play on the stage at the festival. Consider that we got together July 8, 1989, and we were going to play our first gig in September. We gave ourselves 2.5 months to learn a bunch of songs. We had a grocery list of songs we wanted to play and we could barely get through any of them. I have the cassettes to prove it!

The reason this whole thing about "tapes" came up is because I got some more information about the USB cassette deck. Christopher Thelan, the founder of dailyvault.com, pointed out that the nice thing about the USB units from ION is that you can use them as your "regular" stereo pieces. That alleviates my concern that I purchase a $150 piece of equipment, do the conversion and end up with an expensive paperweight.

The other thing I have been thinking about is this. Bear with me - numbers are not my strong suite. I have 1009 cassettes. For the sake of argument, let's figure that I have 1000 tapes I want to convert. Just for the sake of argument, assume that 1000 tapes have 90 minutes on each side. I have a lot of handmade cassettes. I made mix tapes of ballads, of heavy metal songs, & of college answering machine messages (which also include songs that I liked at the time) that later changed into "Life Tapes" and which are now "Life CDs" that I make occasionally from the CDs I routinely spin. So, for the sake of argument, and to pad the estimate, let's say I have 45000 minutes of cassettes to convert. If I worked really hard and stayed away from the TV (and this blog), I *might* be able to devote 2 hours a night to converting these cassettes - so 120 minutes / night. It would take me 375 days in a row - so that means two hours on the major holidays like Christmas, New Year's Day, Thanksgiving, & Easter - and assuming I never spend a night in those 375 days in a row in a different city. Well, I know I'm going to Chicago in May so I can safely say doing this project 375 days in a row is not realistic. So, realistically, I'm looking at a 3-4 year project. This is all because cassette to CD-R has to be done in real time. Unlike the days of dubbing high speed, there is no high speed with this type of conversion.

There are other aspects. The major aspect that throws up a red flag is the deficit between the media types. A lot of my cassettes are on 90 minute tapes and, well, I checked and there is no such thing as a 90 minute CD-R. I found this site that talks about standards and such. This site includes a link to a site that talks about overburning a CD to get 90 minutes on it. Why 90 minutes? Well, a lot of the blank cassettes I bought are 90 minutes.

That means, unfortunately, that I have to somehow crop 10 minutes off of each 90 minute cassette I want to convert, if I were going for a 1:1 conversion. Broken down further, it's 5 minutes a side. So, after converting 10 x 90 minute cassettes, I would have 900 minutes but because I would be working with 80 minute CD-Rs, I would have 100 minutes that wouldn't fit onto 10 CD-Rs. I could have a 'junk' CD-R that would contain all the songs or files that didn't fit, I guess. Or I could burn MP3s and not even mess around with the 1:1 ratio idea. The only negative with that approach is that I would need a media device, like a flash drive or portable hard drive that would be large enough to include all my songs.

That leads me to what is the point of the conversion? If the band from 1989 is as awful as I portrayed them above, why do I want them in a MP3? What possible good could come from that? NONE! How self-indulgent would this project really be? I mean, say I were to start this project 1/1/2010 - just for the sake of argument. Those tapes from the band from 1989? They would be 21 years old! I mean, our toy poodle was alive back then and could be heard barking when we stopped playing. What possible good could that really have?

Thus, the more I digest a cassette to MP3 conversion, I'm leaning more and more toward not doing it. I also can't see hiring someone to do it for me because, frankly, how could anyone possible know what 10 minutes to cut from my "Best of Old Stew" cassette? How would they know which 10 minutes to cut from my "Ballads XX" cassette or from "College Tape: Spring 1990" without listening to the entire cassette at least twice so they would know when to cut a MP3? I mean, I know this material better than anyone ever could want to know it because I own it - I owned the creative process that went into assembling these mix tapes so I know what should be included/excluded. No one else. It's my burden.

Speaking of burdens, I really like "Burden in My Hands" by Soundgarden.




1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Do you play these tapes very often, or would you be transcribing them as a "just in case I ever decide to..." exercise?

If you've only listened to 1% of them in the last ten years, that's probably all you're likely to listen to in the next ten years. As long as you still have a working cassette deck you can still listen to any of one of your tapes if you get the whim one rainy Sunday.

As for your band tapes: why not create one Greatest Hits CD, one Rarities CD, and one Bloopers/Outtakes CD. You'll have fun making them and they'll probably cover most of what you or anyone else would ever want to hear again.

Mix tapes: invest in a basic iPod or similar. Encourage your family and friends to give you iTunes gift cards for Christmas and your birthdays. Gradually recreate the highlights of your musical history.