While not an official contributer to 'Of Two Minds,' Shelley's sidekick is an African Grey parrot named Pepper. His heros are Irene Pepperberg, Alex, and Rachel Carson. He spends his time learning Mandarin and writing the Great American novel.
Why non-native English speaks should have english speaking proofreaders
Category: Academia • Humor • Sex, Drugs, & Rock and Roll
Posted on: August 8, 2008 4:38 PM, by Steve Higgins
Oh you crazy non-English speaking people... please please please take the extra effort and get someone like me with a dirty mind to proofread your papers. And Editors... get your mind INTO the gutter and things like this won't happen.
It all starts innocently with this perfectly normal sounding setup:
Chem. Commun., 2007, 1733 - 1735, DOI: 10.1039/b614147a Electrochemical synthesis of metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunctions and their electronic transport propertiesDachi Yang, Guowen Meng, Shuyuan Zhang, Yufeng Hao, Xiaohong An, Qing Wei, Min Ye and Lide Zhang
Metal and semimetal nanotube-nanowire heterojunction arrays have been achieved by sequential electrochemical-deposition inside the nanochannels of anodic aluminium oxide template with a layer of Au thin enough to leave the pores open.
Neato, Eh?! This is where it all goes horribly wrong:
Uh oh... cunt. uhhh huh huuuh heh huh huh.... I think I'm going to start a Beavis and Butthead knockoff where we read science papers. Maybe Mystery Science Theater 3000 would be a better show to knock off. meh... hehe... cunt.
-Thanks Terry! Via Carbon Based Curiosities-
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Comments
That's nothing.
I live in Russia and some time ago I worked as a consultant at security consulting company named "Щит" (means "Shiled").
Guess what name they used in their first international contract?
Answer: "Shit" (_transliterated_ "Щит") :)
Posted by: Alex Besogonov | August 8, 2008 6:01 PM
Damn. Russian text was garbled. You should have set UTF-8 encoding for your blog :)
Posted by: Alex Besogonov | August 8, 2008 6:04 PM
Wait, there's a science where you spend all day studying cunts? Where do I sign up?
Posted by: Foole | August 8, 2008 8:09 PM
Foole - it's called gynecology, and it takes (most of) the fun out of it...
Posted by: Pierce R. Butler | August 8, 2008 8:29 PM
Unfortunately, it's not just the non-english speaker. There is a drosophila mutant called shibiri (often shortened to shi) which results in paralysis. One allele of this gene is temperature sensitive, often denoted by a ts superscript after the abbreviation.
I seem to recall a grad student (now a successful postdoc), who did a poster on her work with the allele. She was lucky, but irritated, to discover that somewhere during the production of her poster, it had lost the formatting. She now had a poster discussing all sorts of aspects of 'shits.'
She obviously redid the poster...
Posted by: Russ | August 8, 2008 9:10 PM
As a related note, I was reading an article on fruit fly aggression in a recent issue of Nature (I'm sorry, I forget which one, but it was recent), and came across the phrase "other flies just beat the shit out of each other."
While I try to keep my language fairly clean, I'm not shocked that easily (yes, I know that's just begging for a humiliating schooling by reality). I will, however, confess to being surprised.
Posted by: Russ | August 8, 2008 9:22 PM
Well, I managed to name one of my files test.tcl before noticing how said file name is pronounced. Luckily enough, I didn't send it to anyone.
Posted by: CCW | August 8, 2008 9:32 PM
Look at the positive side: the paper is about HETEROjunctions.
Posted by: Lassi Hippeläinen | August 9, 2008 3:06 AM
That's nothin'. I've been living in Japan for the past year, and the amount of mangled English in the official advertising of major companies is simply reprehensible. It's not like there aren't any native English speakers around to check, either; it's more like they're too proud to admit that, after 6 years of mandatory English instruction, they still can't understand the language worth a damn.
Posted by: J. Grybowski | August 9, 2008 10:09 AM
It's not just foreigners in science – native Anglophone cat and rooster breeders are just as bad.
Posted by: brtkrbzhnv | August 9, 2008 2:13 PM
How about a kids game called:
Stinky
&
Beaver
Seriously. The '&' was quite small in the logo as well. Beaver was later renamed Stomper :)
Posted by: Ernst Hot | August 10, 2008 5:28 AM
A real-life proofreader (well, ex-proofreader) here...
A truly professional proofreader would not have corrected this. We might have queried it. But our job was not to "correct" things, it was merely to make sure the typset copy matched the manuscript. I think what you wanted was an editor.
Posted by: speedwell | August 10, 2008 4:38 PM
I think what you meant here was "Why non-native English speakers should have English-speaking proofreaders."
Was the irony here intentional, or accidental? ;^D
By the way, I am an editorial assistant (i.e., proofreader) of peer-review material, and I see stuff like this all the time from American engineers as well as those whose first language is not English. I rather enjoy it; it provides me with some badly needed entertainment value.
~David D.G.
Posted by: David D.G. | August 10, 2008 5:22 PM
I direct your attention to:
A mutant crp allele that differentially activates the operons of the fuc regulon in Escherichia coli
Posted by: Brian | August 10, 2008 6:33 PM
Unfortunate translations also sometimes appear on the labels of consumer products. Quiz bowlers are especially fond of presenting such "How's that again?" gag gifts to players at tournament's end, which is how one of my friends was once awarded a package of imported instant noodles labeled "Cock Soup."
Posted by: Julie Stahlhut | August 11, 2008 8:12 AM
I had to reference this professor's work in my thesis a bit:
http://www.unb.br/ig/prof/ReinhardtAdolfoFuck.htm
But be careful. No laughing until you knock out 50 publications...
Posted by: Lab Lemming | August 12, 2008 2:50 AM
In a high school debate case we once had an important citation belonging to a Dr. Fuck. We decided it was pronounced fook, at least for the purpose of our case.
Posted by: Peter Borah | August 13, 2008 5:16 AM
I dont know where u come from, but Im astonished about how arrogant English speaking persons can be. As far as I know, they are the most hostile against foreign languages themselves. There are more people speaking Chinese and perhaps more speaking Spanish also. This is a very arrogant blog - as a German I dont expect someone to speak my language in the world - English speaking persons do. This makes the difference.
Posted by: Reinhold | August 14, 2008 4:29 PM
Uhh... no one said anything negative about people speaking poor English. The complaint is that for publications which happen to be in some language (who cares which one) they aren't proof read well enough and end up saying dirty things.
Your rantings about English speaking people are not appreciated here.
Posted by: Steve Higgins | August 17, 2008 5:43 PM
Hear, hear, Steve
Posted by: PeteK | August 17, 2008 5:53 PM
Ah, yes, that means you have to interact with the support system for the -eh- interesting part!
There's always a downside to things.
Posted by: shonny | August 17, 2008 11:12 PM
Sadly, it happens to native speakers too. About 5 years ago or so, Canada's two major right-wing political parties merged: the ancient fiscally centre-right/socially moderate Progressive Conservatives, and the upstart fiscally right/socially conservative Reform Party.
One of the terms bandied about for the new merged party was the "Canadian Conservative-Reform Alliance Party", or CCRAP. Needless to say, the press had a field day.
Posted by: False Prophet | September 3, 2008 2:19 PM