Forum: Author Hangout

When you use a non-latin character set, without scene based context such, as set in china town, I would have to run it through google translate just to figure out what language it is. Otherwise, it might as well be Martian.

That's understood, and we've discussed this extensively over the years. In my case, I provide context for the usage, as well as explanations (either direct translations or indirect explanations) for what was said.

The story involves a telepathic character traveling the country interacting with various groups--from a variety of ethnic groups. The main purpose of the language is for surprise--for the reader to pull back and say 'What the hell', and then the context explains what was said--but the confusion reflects that felt by the other characters.

I've never used this technique in other stories (although I used a couple expressions in the last book in my Great Death series), but those weren't nearly as complicated (French and Italian instead of Hindi and Arabic).

Vietnamese (used more often than the other languages) is a rarity, a Latin alphabet with a variety of exotic accent marks. Arabic and Hindi not only use different character sets, but are right-to-left languages, which makes formatting/reading the passages tricky. However, in most cases, only a few native speakers would recognize the terms. However, out of a pride in my own word, I had the phases professionally translated (via fivrr.com) instead of using Google Translate (which gives poor translations).

Thus, including invalid characters wouldn't substantially change the story, but it insults my personal sense of professionalism.

Have you tried making and supplying your own e-pub file for the site? or won't they allow that?

That's what I'm doing. My point is that the characters won't convert from basic html to ePub, despite being properly defined. Apparently, ePubs only accept 'special characters' up to &8260;. Anything higher and you get filler material.

It might be my html editor, since I haven't gotten to Calibre yet. I'm using Adobe's Dreamweaver, which I use for both the html and the ePub, but it won't display the ePubs correctly, and I'm trying to figure out why.

It seems to be an ePub limitation, rather than the html editor. Again, it works fine with most languages, the only one I've found which doesn't is Hindi (their accented characters push the upper boundry).

CW, I know you use .doc files, can you send me one of the concerned stories as a .doc containing the tough characters and let me see what I can do getting it into an e-pub for you. I suspect it may be a html conversion issue.

CW, I know you use .doc files, can you send me one of the concerned stories as a .doc containing the tough characters and let me see what I can do getting it into an e-pub for you. I suspect it may be a html conversion issue.

I'll send them to you, but again, the conversion to html went off without a hitch--and has been up on my website for a long time. It's when I take the UTF-8 file from html and copy it to the UTF-8 html for the epub file that things get screwy. Since there's no epub restrictions to the original html file, I'm not sure what the problem could be. You'd think the same program (Dreamweaver) would process the htm and html files identically.

CW, I know you use .doc files, can you send me one of the concerned stories as a .doc containing the tough characters and let me see what I can do getting it into an e-pub for you. I suspect it may be a html conversion issue.

Ernest figured it out. I sent him the original files and he attempted to run it thru Calibre to see what the resulting ePub looked like. Since he didn't have the directory of included files it failed (I used graphical Titles and section breaks, so it couldn't build a Table of Contents). I then tried it myself (which I hadn't, because I wanted to get it right before I wasted my time with it).

Turns out the issue was a temporary display issue in DreamWeaver. The Hindi display perfectly in the finished ePub, even though it didn't in my html editor. Problem solved! (Though technically, it never actually existed in the first place anywhere but in my own imagination.)

Thanks Ernest. You're a lifesaver. Now I can finish the document off.

Life Savers is an American brand of ring-shaped hard candy. Its range of mints and artificial fruit-flavors is known for its distinctive packaging, coming in paper-wrapped aluminum foil rolls.

Life Savers were named that because, after a rash (supposedly) of deaths from choking on hard candies, the inventor produced a hard candy with a hole in the middle (so you could still breathe, even if you had one caught in your throat).

But what the hell does that have to do with his being a "lifesaver"? You need to learn the difference between Corporate Product names and the legitimate use of English words and phrases. ;D

Life Savers were named that because, after a rash (supposedly) of deaths from choking on hard candies,

According to wikipedia, it's named that way because it looks like a life preserver used for saving people falling overboard (which is what I thought so I checked).

According to wikipedia, it's named that way because it looks like a life preserver used for saving people falling overboard (which is what I thought so I checked).

Switch, the wiki article is interesting in that it provides no reference for the shape being the reason for the name, although I think there is a connection. However I think both of you are right, in a way. The final shape and name is due to how it looks, but I think that came about from a desire to design a candy with the hole in it for safety reason. In the article is a picture from a 1917 add which stats: We feature the hole because Life Savers are the only mints which have a hole in them. This little hole is your protection - look for it, and be sure you have a genuine Life Savers. They thought the hole was important enough to set their ad campaign around it. thus I think the shape derived from the safety intent and that linked in with the final name then feeding back into making the final design to match.

According to Snopes, that's a myth.

Life Savers were invented in 1912 by Clarence Crane, who had been making and selling chocolate candy in the Cleveland area since 1891 and thought to augment his product line with a non-melting candy during the summer when chocolate sales were slow.

Crane envisioned a round, flat peppermint in preference to the pillow-shaped ones then being imported from Europe, and he hired a pharmaceutical pill maker to press his new mints into a circle and punch a hole in them. It was their shape that inspired the name: they looked like life savers, so Life Savers they became.

They were originally a breath mint.

the original product packaging pictured an old seaman throwing a life preserver to a young female swimmer with the slogan "For That Stormy Breath"

According to Snopes, that's a myth.

Snopes say the claim he invented them because his daughter choked to death is a myth. Neither article has much to say about why the name was chosen in the first place, but the wiki article did have a copy of the old ad I quoted

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1917_Life_Savers_ad.png

edit to add: The only one who knows, for sure, why the name was chosen is Crane, their inventor, and I can't find any readily accessible Internet document where he says why. Lots of guesses and assumptions by people, but no definitive information.

The fact that the company touted the hole in early adds as a safety factor doesn't necessarily mean that's why the inventor designed them with a hole.

Nor does it say it wasn't. The only thing they know for sure is: Crane insisted on having a hole in his, and that meant he had to get it made for him by a pill manufacturer. Crane designed them, had some made for the US summer of 1912, which he sold retail for some months, then sold the formula and idea to Noble in 1913.

The wiki article, like a few others, make the claim the name comes from the shape, yet they provide no supporting reference source for that claim. No one seems to have a definitive statement from Crane as to why he chose the name. Also, on the other side of the issue is the ad is from 1917, some years later. How long they had been using that advertising approach isn't stated, either. There's sufficient available information to support both claims, and nothing totally ruling either claim out. Also, both were used for advertising purposes.

The only thing that has been ruled out was the one mentioned in Snopes where it was claimed he was motivated by the choking death of a daughter, when his motivation, provided with source references in wiki, was for something to sell in summer when his chocolate sales were down due to the heat.

The only thing about the shape that's known for sure, is he insisted on having the hole in the centre, and this made them look different to similar products on the market at that time.

typo edit

Crane didn't choose the name Life Savers. Crane called them Pep-O-Mint, Noble came up with the Life Savers name.

All the references I can find have Crane calling them Pep-O-Mint Life Savers and that was they both sold them as for a while, then Noble later dropped the Pep-O-Mint from the name.

You can't make an ePub is anything but, and because I've hard coded the foreign language in, I used UTF-8 for those too. So both are UTF-8, but only the html displays properly.

@D.S.

Rather, I suggest phonetic translation to a latin alphabet so I can get a feel for what it would have sounded like to be listening to what was said.

Sorry, D.S. I never address your phonetic translation idea. Unlike you, I rarely approve of phonetic translations as they never sound authentic to me. I've traveled enough, I could recall what language sounds like, even if I can't translate it.

The bit about 'my sense of professionalism' concerned my fretting about something that readers can't read (and thus can't tell is wrong) anyway, but it bugs me that--after going to that much work to get it right--I can't display the correct text.

If anyone disagrees with typing out phonetic translations let me know and I might reconsider, but I just can't remember many examples in literature where it works well.

@Harold Wilson

Take another look at your text. It's likely those characters are unicode combining accents. That means there are two or more glyphs drawing in the same space. (The way CRT terminals used to draw underlines with "A", backspace, "_".)

Your idea sounded good, but examining it letter by letter, the higher codes are used for the combinations. In fact, a few of them include the trailing/preceding space (since it's a right-to-left language). Again, it seems like the ePub developers instituted a top level character limit which eliminates the use of certain languages. Why they'd do that, I have no clue (other than limiting overhead). They might have decided combining accent marks and spacing was superfluous.

Set aside the effort you put into having the translations done for a moment and think about it from the readers perspective.

If replacing the Arabic or Hindi script with blank spaces doesn't materially affect the reader's experience, was any value obtained from the effort / money put into having the translations done?

Sorry, but I don't think I'm going to rewrite the entire story on your say-so alone (about foreign languages being a "no-go" with readers).

If anyone out there can suggest examples of where phonetic translations work, or where using foreign languages don't, or if a few people all agree that phonetic is the way to go, I'll stick with what I have.

It's not the $5 I invested, or the effort I put into making it work. Instead, I believe that the way I wrote those sections work since I provide context for the usage, the language used is supposed to surprise the characters, and the meaning of what's said is explained/conveyed in the story, I think I've done a pretty good job of it.

The idea is that someone with telepathy can communicate easily with non-English speakers, so the scenes capture the surprise of those surrounding the main character, and the MC's reactions to what was said (translating a language he's never heard before) shows that he's a step ahead of everyone else in the story.

I'm sorry, but I need more convincing than "I like things spelled out phonetically". For all I know, you might be the only one who prefers that style. No offense, but I just don't have any basis for evaluating your advice.

All that being said, I think my initial assumptions about the improperly displaying text were correct. No one else here has ever worked with foreign languages before, and thus hasn't encountered or heard of this problem before. I think I need to get more creative about my Google searches on the subject.