This past Monday I presented at Tokyo 2.0, Japan’s largest bilingual web/tech community. I presented as part of a session on The Web and Language, which I also helped organize. Other presenters included Junji Tomita from goo Labs, Shinjyou Sunao of Knowledge Creation, developers of the Voice Delivery System API, and Chris Salzberg of Global Voices Online on community translation.
I just put together a video of my Ubiquity presentation, mixing the audio recorded live at the presentation together with a screencast of my slides for better visibility. The presentation is 10 minutes long and is bilingual, English and Japanese.
Here are the slides I used in that session. There are two “demo” sections in the slides… the first was a simple demo of Ubiquity 0.1.x showing off the translate, map, and edit-page commands. The second demo was of Ubiquity Parser 2 and showing off how little code it takes to add your language to Ubiquity with Parser 2.
Every day on the way to work I walk by a fine establishment known as Yoshinoya (吉野家), Japan’s largest gyudon (牛丼) chain restaurant. For those of you whose lives have yet to be graced by gyudon, it’s a bowl of rice topped with beef and onions stewed in a sweet-savory soy-based sauce. Loving gyudon and being a cheapskate, I naturally noticed the recent 50 yen off gyudon promotion at Yoshinoya. The above photo is a photo of part of that sign.
Part of this sign, though, made me think about our new Ubiquity parser. In particular, it was the attachment ambiguity in the end date of the promotion. The text in the photo above literally is “April 15th (Wed.) 8PM until”. (Note that Japanese is a strongly head-final language, and that the “until” is a postposition.) There are two possible readings for this expression, as illustrated by the two composition trees below.
Yesterday I presented on Ubiquity internationalization and the new parser design at the Mozilla Extension Development Meeting (Japanese), a community event organized by some extension developers in Japan. There were a couple other Ubiquity-related “lightning talks” as well, so I’ll summarize some of the interesting ideas from those talks below.
About two doors down from my new place is a restaurant serving ramen (ラーメン, derived from the Chinese 拉麵), a distinctive type of noodle. Ramen noodles are wheat-based but crucially use kansui (鹹水), a mineral-rich water.1 This water colors the noodles yellow and helps add a certain firmness to the noodles. The noodles can be served in a variety or different ways (with regional variations as well), but it is most often served in a miso-, soy sauce-, pork broth-, or salt-based soup.
The store down the street is called ichifuku (一福). Not only is it one of the closest restaurants to my house, it’s also been featured on a number of ramen restaurants and websites. The store is known for its delicious miso ramen but also for its more creative, Western-style arrangements. The female shopkeeper is often running everything by herself, gardening out front as well as cooking and playing great music.
Here are some pictures of the great food they serve:
If you ever come by the Hatsudai area, I highly recommend a visit. The address is: 東京都渋谷区本町６−６−４.
NB: Kansui in Japanese refers to a specific type of solution, while the same word in Chinese simply means “salt water.” ↩
I’m certainly not the first one who’s noticed that Japanese apartment buildings often have weird English names (I can think of Tony László in one of the ダーリンは外国人 books.) In fact, I moved into my very own “Palace Mansion” myself a couple weeks ago. No, really. That’s the name of the place.
A mansion? By Japanese standards, yes.1 A palace? Um… not quite. Take a look—here are some pictures from my move-in.
マンション (“mansion”) in Japanese actually refers to an apartment complex of at least a certain size. It’s an instance of 和製英語—English-sounding words in the Japanese lexicon which, for some reason or another, do not actually exist or mean the same thing in English. ↩
