Roxana C.

Also, if you don't know something from lived experience, it can be hard to tell how it would affect your life. Do Americans not like walkable cities, or would they just hate being carless in something not that different from their current city?

I'm not sure I managed to make this make as much sense as it does in my head. (I'm sleepy and phrasing things feels harder than it ought to.)

But they're both stories about how, eventually, you need to leave behind your "toys" in order to be a "proper adult", as society views adults.

This, supposedly, will earn you the reward of a romantic partner.

It's not dating advice on how to find someone who will love you. It's a dangling carrot.

The story we're told is this: men mature slower, but they *need* to put aside boyish things, pick up responsibility and be "men".

Women, by contrast, are always assumed to have left behin "girlish" things long before. They are presumed to have no desire to play, or engage deeply with stories.

If you watch movies in this key*, I meant to say above.

Women can be in fandom as kids, wanting to be princesses, and that's "cute". Then they can progress to boy band fandom - but this is more of a precursor to real relationships. They get boy crazy, and then they find a guy to date.

Fandom and play are seen as "childish", so they need to be put aside to be a "viable adult". If you watch movies, guys need to throw out their "toys" to represent maturity.

But women are presumed to mature faster and are therefore rarely represented as having fandom or toys.

I have some Thoughts about this. I think you're right about male shame. But I think it's part of a larger narrative about "normality" and "adulthood", that assumes that all romantic relationships are similar and share similar goals - all happy relationships are similar and all that.

It's frustrating enough that I'm very serious about potentially switching careers.

But LLMs don't grow, and don't work in teams. They just spew things out, inconsistently. Your job is no longer "expert". It's "expert-turned-nanny".

I can't do my job properly because now I'm just fixing stuff that I didn't need to fix before. It's so frustrating.

(Yes, I've also been the translator being grabbed. It's not pleasant to be told you messed up; but once you realize humans are better working together than trying to reinvent the wheel on their own, you realize that having a good reviewer is like having an extra brain. They're on your side!)

Perhaps they need some particularity of English grammar explained to them, or maybe they need some extra info about the project?

(I think we all make mistakes and that it's good to grab someone and say "Yo, there's an issue, let's fix it". Because then they improve. Win-win.)

With human translators, the errors are more consistent. You can grab them and have a meeting to discuss persistent problems and how to fix them. Maybe they don't know how to check the official terminology? Maybe they didn't realize what a certain type of project is for?

Instead of figuring out how to make a user interface feel tailored to its purpose, I'm patching up things like I'm playing whack-a-mole. Every time I fix something, I feel like I missed an obvious mole somewhere else. Did I check the terminology *everywhere*, or did my eyes glaze over something?

Some errors truly feel like Amelia Bedelia's been there - "Check back soon" became something akin to "Check the Backwards soon".

Ah, and that reminds me - random capital letters. Because why not?

Because it's been instructed to keep sentences about the same length in Romanian as they are in English, sometimes it adds words that alter the meaning of the text or deletes words that really ought to be there.

Sometimes it doesn't know the difference between "Preview item" and "Item preview". What is word order? Who knows.

"If your kid does something, they" - the "they" here will correctly be singular. However, if it's, "Your kid did something. They", then the "they" is plural.

The LLM translation also has a problem with terminology. It loooooves synonyms, which is fine sometimes, but really bad when I need the "Help Center" to always be a "Help Center", and not a "Help Corner"/"Help Center"/"Support Center"/Support Bureau".

I've got some software stuff I'm working on right now. Menus. Buttons. Error messages. The like.

Normally I'd be trying to find a nice way to get the point across succintly. Instead, I'm fixing plurals that should be singulars, singulars that should be plurals.

And now we're in the age of AI, and too many people want to cut costs by having "GoogleTranslate 2: LLM Boogaloo" do "most of the work".

...it's not doing "most of the work". It's definitely filling in some words. Some of them are even the correct ones. But too many aren't.

("Share" doesn't have a perfect match in Romanian. It's been translated as "partajează" in the olden days (a word meant for splitting possessions in a divorce) or "distribuie" ("distribute"), or "împarte" ("divide"), or "trimite" ("send"), or "împărtășește" ("share", but also "take communion") etc.)

It was surprising, because I always thought that what I can do, others can do, too. All you need is a feel for language and the patience to go through a dozen options before you find a great one. Or a decent one. Or something you can live with, at the very least, because "share" makes us all cry.

Not to brag, but I'm one of the top translators from English into Romanian for software and games. How I ended up in localization is a bit of an accident, but it turned out I was very well-suited for the job, and any project I got sent a test for, I got. I translated. I reviewed. I led teams.

Holy 💩

Tiny, colorful baby scallops — a total cuteness overload in one dish!

You might think, “This person posts the same creature every year!” But honestly, seeing the same life return year after year is something truly wonderful𓂃🫧‪

OK- here we go. Sorry for the delay, I was not prepared for the exertion required in the thrill-a-minute adventure that is… CACAO FERMENTATION.

Yes, this will actually take 5 days. After that two days of drying. I’m not making this up. Nothing happens. Really. You’ll see.

Anyway, off we go!

SecState Rubio claims that no on has died because of USAID cuts and suggested that I had lied in my reporting. So here I show him photos of specific children who have died because of the Trump administration's reckless cancelation of aid: www.nytimes.com/2025/05/31/o...

It's not just grammar and context - it's the whole millieu of what phrasing we use when. Sarcasm, cultural references, indicators of class or age, pompousness or openness, curtness or friendliness - they can depend on the synonyms used.

There's a lot of extra info there we derive from "reading the room". Who uses this kind of phrasing? In what context would a person say such a thing?

My favorite example is "Forgive me, father, for I have sinned" vs "Sorry, daddy, I've been naughty." Synonyms, but...

As for literary - there's so much going on behind the words themselves. What's sarcasm and what's earnest? Is that a pun? Is this a reference to something very famous and how do you handle it? Is the character's grammar bad on purpose and why? Does the character sound youthful or old?

And when I say "fits the style of the original", I don't just mean in a literary context. You want technical manuals to read like technical manuals, not like modernist poetry; you want informative texts to be as accessible/specialized as the original. And you don't want clunky news articles.