The Journal: Happy February

by

In today’s Journal

* Aggregators (Distributors) and a new resource.
* Of Interest

Only a very short post today.For some reason I wanted to mark the passing of February 1 or something.

Hey, a happy belated welcome to February 2022. Full disclosure, frankly I’m still wondering what happened to 1978. Anyway….

You can still get a PDF copy of my slightly outdated but still very useful book The Essentials of Digital Publishing, a $10 value, free if you email me and ask. The addy is harveystanbrough@gmail.com.

Also, you can still get the full PDF searchable archives of this Journal all the way back to October 2014 free, again if you just email and let me know you want them. Wow, do I wish I’d had a resource like this when I was starting out, or anytime in the first few years.

Aggregators (Distributors)

Even if you already use another aggregator like Smashwords (clunky interface) or Draft2Digital (a smooth interface but somewhat limited distribution), I suggest you also take a look at StreetLib. To start, you can Read The Latest Issue of Their Newsletter.

I also recommend a new resource, TNPS (The New Publishing Standard). Extremely interesting and timely articles on today’s publishing. Browse https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/.

Talk with you again soon.

Of Interest

See “Chinese bot translates 300-page book from English to Chinese in 30 seconds with 95% accuracy” at https://thenewpublishingstandard.com/2018/10/17/chinese-bot-translates-300-page-book-from-english-to-chinese-in-30-seconds-with-95-accuracy/. This was first posted back in 2018. Somehow I missed it.

Disclaimer: In this blog, I provide advice on writing fiction. I advocate a technique called Writing Into the Dark. To be crystal clear, WITD is not “the only way” to write, nor will I ever say it is. However, as I am the only writer who advocates WITD both publicly and regularly, I will continue to do so, among myriad other topics.

4 thoughts on “The Journal: Happy February”

  1. Re: “Chinese bot translates 300-page book from English to Chinese in 30 seconds with 95% accuracy”

    Call me a cynic if you will, but I can’t help suspecting that well before this article was published the Chinese Communist Party was already aware of and using this software to make sense of military and industrial secrets purloined by its espionage agents.

  2. This is not so difficult as it looks. English and Chinese are both isolating language, where words almost never change and it’s grammar role depends only on position in sentence (jokes like “Why bird can fly, but fly can’t bird?” are possible in Chinese or English, but not even in Spanish).

    Fusional languages are much difficult to translation software, because of free words order and different grammar forms and there’re much more Fusional languages then isolating ones. So, translation software has not only to translate words, but also make them a proper form, that is never easy.

    The translation of Bible to Church Slavonic at 9th century was so direct, that translators even saved the word order of Hebrew and Greek original, just adding some helping words in most complicated verses. It still can be read by modern people (the language itself sounds ancient, but understandable), but the whole style is very unusual, “biblical” (unusual word order, repetitions of conjunction words).

    So the books translated with software still need an editor.

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