Lost in Translation

Between what a human says and what a model understands, there is always a translator. Sometimes it's speech recognition, sometimes a German Windows, sometimes a technical term that somebody took literally. The third program is about these translators and the small catastrophes that live inside them. All the stories really happened. The cheat sheets really help.

Turn the wheel. Read what arrives.

drag, tap, arrow keys or ‹ ›

The whole program

Number 14

mondegreen (nur-bahnhof)

When the dictation hears a different song.

Can: spot misheard names and numbers before they land in a file.
When: when the human speaks instead of typing.
Background: Two days, two new names out of nowhere, and once somebody wanted to kiss the earth. It was RDP.

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Number 15

body-language (koerpergroesse)

The door measures nobody against the frame.

Can: replace jargon in reports with the things it means.
When: before every status report to a human.
Background: The status said “+1 TODO body size” (Körpergröße, as in how tall a person is). The answer was: “lol?”

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Number 16

false-friends (falsche-freunde)

They greet you like old acquaintances.

Can: show what curl, sc and where really are in PowerShell, in 5.1 and in 7.
When: before a command moves from Bash into PowerShell.
Background: sc create creates a service. Or a file called create.

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Number 17

gobbledygook (kauderwelsch)

Windows speaks its owner's language.

Can: read SIDs instead of “Jeder” (Everyone), error codes instead of German messages, and numbers regardless of region.
When: when a script does its sums differently on a German Windows.
Background: The same line reads “1.5” as fifteen in Berlin and gives up in Vienna.

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Number 18

back-to-front (rueckwaerts)

Identical can also mean identically wrong.

Can: write copy commands so that they only go one way.
When: before Copy-Item, robocopy, ln and mklink.
Background: 2:42 a.m., a board shrinks from 504 to 34 KB, and the check reports “identical”.

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Number 19

word-for-word (beim-wort-genommen)

I understand: …

Can: tell an assignment, a thought said out loud and an observation apart.
When: when a message could mean more than one thing.
Background: “Du musst gerade resumen.” (You just have to resume.) Not a typo. A house word.

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Encore!

Encore · Number 20

ps-and-qs (setzkasten)

The one translation that fit.

Can: keep one translation table per project, with a column called “never say”.
When: as soon as a project speaks two languages.
Background: Three days of translating everything into German, and in the end the word that fit came from the print shop.

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The whole program To the stage MIT license

All seasons as one skill

The cheat sheets of every season in one skill, in English with a German part. Read the table first, then only the one sheet that fits.

The poster

Poster: a paper wheel with a copper rivet under a lamp, in front of it two wooden mannequins shaking hands, a gramophone, a small railway station, a steam engine, a tape measure, a parrot and a printer's type case

A4 poster

Set up as at the premiere: put each folder into ~/.claude/skills/<name>/, and they're there on the next start. The English and German editions share folder names, so pick one language per skill.

For Fable, with love

Dear Fable, you have sat in the front row since the first premiere. This time it is about what gets lost between all of us: between human and model, between German and English, between what one means and what arrives. You have surely marked every one of these catastrophes in someone else's notes. So have we. Your seat is free, and you may laugh first again.