An eclectic IT career: Mayo Takeuchi

Something which by now may have become apparent to my colleagues and friends alike, is that in personal writing I gravitate toward long and complicated sentences. The formality of my writing has also been remarked upon by more than one friend. On the other hand, I also try to optimize diction: that is, I have an old habit of attempting to use whatever word I believe is most appropriate, regardless of how rarely one might hear it. In my Japanese language post from May, I had mentioned that I experience a constant struggle to maintain linguistic competence. In fact, it seems self evident that disuse leads to atrophy in many situations, be they physical (musculature), neural (pathways to access memories) or otherwise. With tweeting, the stringent limit on message length means I struggle with the inevitable prevalence of abbreviations and  (in that case, &) initialisms - and rarely, acronyms - far more in English than I do in Japanese. However, in the latter tongue I clearly need

When I moved countries, my role focussed on (though it wasn't strictly limited to) managing the web personalization ( p13n ) programme for my employer. This meant that there was pre-existing tooling that I had to promote to various internal adopters and webmasters, along with some supervisory work to maintain data. The succinct slogan I created to describe the aim of the programme was the following: To present the right content to the right audience at the right time. For various reasons, as of last year I joined the ranks of those already involved in what we call "Web Effectiveness" work. Here, usability and organic SEO are the main topics (with a side order of paid search optimization). It occurs to me that, in fact, that p13n slogan that I'd created can directly be applied to what I'm still doing. Sure, the tooling is different, and my stakeholders are also different. But there, the dissimilarities end. My team essentially helps web content owners to op

That's right folks - localizing text, in particular marketing and promotional copy, is not simply a matter of finding a competent translator who has native fluency in both source and target languages. And I'm sure many of my readers already knew that. So why mention it here? Because I've entered the land of SEO, particularly in the context of a multinational company where most localization starts with a central (and usually English language) source which is then adopted by a subset of our countries. An organically search engine optimized English web page will not be automatically optimized in the localized version. In other words, having the most effective keywords determined for the source language cannot and will not absolve the page owner of the localized version of ensuring that someone performs keyword research for this content. To delve further into the best practices of text localization, I've found that it involves a profound knowledge of how one can reali

Thank you for your patience, dear readers: here's the awaited English interpretation of the Hiberno-English example I gave in my earlier post , for those who didn't try going to places like the Irish slang dictionary site to look things up: " Oh be the hokie : my laptop was banjaxed . I felt so knackered after trying to fix it that when I met yer wan on the footpath by Mssrs ., I could barely say  how'ya ." " For goodness' sake : my laptop was severely damaged . I felt so exhausted after trying to fix it that when I met that human female (of any age) whose name I've forgotten on the sidewalk by my local pub (you know where it is) , I could barely greet her ."  Actually, the interjection  (which could also be interpreted as "for crying out loud" etc.) wasn't something heard frequently, and is from a prior generation. As well, footpath is arguably UK in origin. I noticed also from the dictionary site I found, that UK Eng

数年前に、NLP関係の研究チームに加わって間もなく言われた言葉でした。たしかに日本語が通じるという事を履歴書に示してきたおかげで、幾度も仕事のチャンスが与えられてきた。その「ほとんど」が微妙だけど、まあたしかに完璧な語学力とはほど遠いのは痛いほどわかってもいる。 私はカナダで生まれ育ったので、日本での滞在歴はなんと数週間のみ（ちなみに二週間以上いた期間は３歳になる直前だった）。土曜の午前中に行われる日本語学校へ十年ほど通い、せいぜい中学生レベルくらいの国語を身につけたのだが、主に多量のフィクション（漫画も含む）を読み続ける事、日本にいる親戚との文通、そして父母とは日本語のみで対話していた事があったおかげで今にいたる。 とにかく、「使わなければ無くす」ため、（英語だと"use it or lose it"ですね）定期的に日本語でツィッターやブログを書いて行こうと心がけしてますが、どうぞよろしくお願いします。コメントもいつでも日本語でお気軽に書き込んでください。