GIMP, also known as the GNU Image Manipulation Program, is a great free and open source graphics creation and editing suite suite, which comes as part of the standard software installation package for many GNU/Linux distributions, although it is also available for other operating systems.
My main use for GIMP is for dealing with graphics containing text in files submitted for translation, as well as tweaking digital photographs.
Nevertheless, every now and again the urge strikes me to learn a bit more to make the most of the software installed on my systems.
If, like me, you have ever wondered how to add a speech bubble to an image using GIMP, help is at hand in the form of the handy video tutorial below.
Now you too know how to put words into other people’s mouths . 😀
February 14th is St Valentine’s Day, a day normally devoted in non-pandemic times to the enrichment of florists and restaurateurs, and generally associated with the pleasures of romance and love.
However, the North Wales Police Rural Crime Unit had matters of countryside damage on its mind that day, when it tweeted the following.
Pleasure themselves? Surely not!
Take a close look at the second paragraph of the tweet and Mr/Ms Plod clearly meant something completely different.
The person in charge of the force Twitter account clearly spent yesterday in a state of confusion between love and lust. 😀
I do hope they got their vocabulary sorted out by the time they came off shift and headed home to spend time with their significant other.
When related to property, the noun premises is defined by Collins Dictionary as:
a piece of land together with its buildings, esp considered as a place of business.
When related to property, premises has since time immemorial (or even longer. Ed.) been a plural noun.
However, it is a source of constant surprise how many people these days regard premises as a singular noun, as shown by this recent example, courtesy of Manchester City Council.
A singular example
However, it should be remembered that premise does exist as a singular noun, in which instance it takes the following definition:
something that is supposed to be true and is used as a basis for developing an idea.
Local authorities are not the only people to get confused about premises and premise as regards use of the plural and singular.
Take this example on Twitter courtesy of the constabulary in Shrewsbury.
A singular licence
That’s right. Why have a premises licence when a premise licence will do just as well? I’m sure Mr Plod meant the former, but having a licence for a premise raises many new questions indeed.
Professor Paul Brains of Washington State University has included the confusing of premises and premise in his book, Common Errors in English Usage. Read his simple, eloquent distinction.
Premises are also quite particular about where any action takes place too. Anything that happens always, always takes place on them, not in them.
The introduction of a blanket ban on smoking indoors gave rise to a wave of illiteracy, as exemplified by this typical example.
Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
It does feel as though those of use who are held to higher standards of language use and/or were taught proper English (Ahem! Ed.) are fighting a losing battle. Will premises become increasingly singular? Will actions take place in them ( or it? Ed.) in future?
For the answers to such questions, one must wait and see.
Only time can tell as language always has been dynamic, i.e. a moving target: and what is regarded as proper usage will always be subject to change, just like language itself.
Occasionally in recent weeks, this blog has provided information on keyboard shortcuts for unusual characters (unusual for English that is. Ed.) on a Linux keyboard.
The last of these took the umlaut (diaresis) as its subject (posts passim).
German road sign for Schloßstraße in Erfurt
Today, attention turns once again to German and the s key, which can produce two characters, depending upon the combination of keystrokes.
Depressing the AltGr key and s produces “ß“, the German sharp s or esszett, usually transcribed in English as ss.
The other character that can be produced is “§“, which can be produced with the AltGr, Shift and s keys.
Known as the Section sign, it is believed to originate from the Latin signum sectionis, meaning section sign and usually turns up in with reference to legal documents.
Where more than one section of a legal text is involved, the sign is repeated, i.e §§.
After Wales’ 21-13 decisive victory in yesterday’s Six Nations rugby fixture in Cardiff, Traffig Cymru, the Welsh Government’s traffic information service, couldn’t resist having a bit of fun on Twitter at the expense of the England squad and English rugby fans.
Swing low…
I wonder if the chariot had been rescued by a band of angels before Mr Plod had a chance to find it… 😀
Gloucestershire Live is a sister title of the Bristol Post/Bristol Live and as such provides a similar mediocre quality of journalism to its victims readers.
My Gloucestershire friends have this morning confirmed via social media that as far as the governance of the county is concerned, politics inevitably equals the Conservatives and the Blue Team dominate what is effectively a de facto one-party state.
In Ireland, any predominantly Irish-speaking area is known as a Gaeltacht (plural: GaeltachtaÃ). The island’s Gaeltachtaà are shown in green on the map below.
The green-shaded area beneath the Dingle Peninsula is the Iveragh Peninsula (Irish: UÃbh Ráthach) in County Kerry and an interesting appointment has just been made here.
Yesterday Irish broadcaster RTE reported that a Russian had been appointed as an Irish language officer there and would be leading efforts to revive the Irish language there.
RTE states:
Victor Bayda, a native of Moscow, has taken up the post with Comhchoiste Ghaeltacht UÃbh Ráthaigh, a community organisation in the south Kerry Gaeltacht of UÃbh Ráthach.
Mr Bayda is a fluent Irish speaker and has been teaching it in Moscow for about fifteen years. In addition to Irish, Mr Bayda also speaks Dutch, Scots Gaelic, Welsh, Swedish, French, German and Icelandic.
His duties in his new post will include implementing a comprehensive language plan aimed at arresting the decline of the language on the peninsula, where 60% of the residents claim the ability to speak Irish.
According to the 2016 Irish census, just 7% of the Gaeltacht population speak Irish daily outside the education system.
Mr Bayda becomes the tenth Irish language planning officer to be appointed so far in Gaeltacht areas.
In 2017, Victor posted the video below on Youtube.
The way a completed translation has been produced has changed markedly over the decades since my first days as a translator for Imperial Tobacco in Bedminster, Bristol.
In those days I’d write out the translation in longhand from printed source material and take my manuscript to the typing pool where it would be transformed into typescript.
The next big change came with my learning how to touch-type. By this time I was a freelance with no more access to a typing pool.
In my early freelance days, it was rare to get editable copy that one could overkey with one’s usual word processor, spreadsheet or presentation package. The standard way of working was still from hard copy propped up in a copyholder alongside one’s keyboard.
Then there came a large surge in the use of formats such as PDF – Portable Document Format. This format enables documents, including text formatting and images, to be presented in a manner independent of application software, hardware and operating systems.
If the PDF was text-based, one could simply export the text as plain ASCII text or copy and paste it into a word processor.
However, if I had an image-based PDF to work with, my usual answer was to print it out as hard copy to be propped up in a copyholder alongside my keyboard. This was very expensive in terms of paper and other consumables for the printer, even with a machine as parsimonious as my trusty mono laser printer, whose cartridge was good for printing 3,000 or so pages of copy.
In addition to the expense of printing, there was a far greater drawback to bear in mind, i.e. one could easily miss a sentence or paragraph from the original text when keying in the translated from a hard copy original, with the consequent implications for the quality of the finished work and the client’s satisfaction with it.
Then I discovered OCR – Optical Character Recognition – the mechanical or electronic conversion of images of typed, handwritten or printed text into machine-encoded text.
Here’s a short video explaining the basics of OCR.
Recognized text displayed directly next to the image;
Post-processing of the recognised text, including spellchecking;
Generating PDF documents from hOCR documents.
I generally just stick scanning the input file to plain text, which can then be fed into a regular office suite for translation. If your office suite can handle HTML that’s the format gImageReader outputs as its hOCR output.
The tesseract OCR engine mentioned above can also be enhanced with language packs for post-recognition spellchecking, as mentioned in the features above. At present, tesseract can recognise over 100 different languages.
In addition to GUI-based OCR, there are also Linux packages available which can perform OCR via the command line interface.
More complicated command options are possible, but after using that simple string above, you’ll be able to extract the text from your formerly image-based PDF ready for translation.
By way of conclusion depending on the software itself, OCR packages can also extract text from images such as .jpg files.
