turktrans blog

As I wrote in my last post, I am working on a voluminous translation project about Turkish legislation on EHS. The direction is from English to Turkish, and sometimes, I find it difficult to grasp the meaning of certain sentences, expressions, and terms. And after some back-and-forth, the true meaning occurs to me like an “Aha” insight!

Just a moment ago, I was trying to translate a certain sentence explaininig the aim of Turkish Law No 1380 on Aquatic Products. The sentence reads: [the Law] delineates the water quality standards for goods containing water.” It was like a difficult riddle at first. Simply, I felt that it is incomprehensible or I am lacking something critical.

Ant after a while, it came like a revelation that the expression goods containing water should in fact be aquatic products! Yes, the Law in question regulates the water quality requirements for aquatic products. I now understand that the source document is in fact a translation from Turkish.

That is to say, I am translating a document from English to Turkish which is itself a translation from Turkish to English! A backtranslation! Having noted this funny blooper, now I can return to work.

I am translating a series of documents on the Turkish legislation on Environment, Health and Safety (EHS) currently applicable in Turkey. Documents cover up-to-date information on almost all regulations, decrees, laws, communiques, etc. with a direct relevance to EHS with extensive citations, examples, etc.

The project is rather large. It will take a whole month or so to deliver the project. After completing it, I will take a break (well, a long break) in July. Therefore, I will not be available for new English Turkish translations until August 1st.

If you reached this page while searching a Turkish translator, please visit our freelance Turkish translators page to find an available colleague for your project.

If you have a blog with a decent PR, your blog is exposed to a specific kind of automated link spam attack called commentspam. A botlike program crawls the web, identifies the blogs, and tries to post comments to each and every message it finds with backlinks to the spammer’s site. And this is what I am experiencing recently.

By default, I turned the comments option off as a guard against comment spamming. Nevertheless, and to my disappointment, Wordpress (at least Version 1.5) is unable to defend itself against comment spamming even if the comments option is turned off. My blog receives some 50 comment spams a day on the average. All are related to some credit card, mortgage, casino, travel or pharmacy sites selling viagra or similar drugs.

Thanks to God they are not published automatically, as I checked the “moderation required” option to moderate any comments. But I need to check my blog once in a while to delete all the comments posted so as to prevent the blog database from swelling too much.

I recently read a post in Google’s blogpost on comment spam again. It recommends using “nofollow” attribute for links in comments to fight against comment spam. But it is of no avail in many cases. It only tells the search engine(s) that you do not vouch for the link, that the link is “worthless” to visit. It does not prevent the spammer from stuffing your page with keywords that are in no way related to your site or the topic of your page. The only way is to ban such comments alltogether.

Perhaps it is time to upgrade my wordpress. I will check if the Wordpress 2 has a way to prevent such automatic posting of comments.