Language and style

I recently read an article about the Swedish. By Swedish I refer to the unique attributes of Sweden.

Among comments I saw one about the Swedish silence, and this should be read in a social context. Another concerned our language and its ability to give colour to our surrounding nature.

The reason I bring this up is a number of conversations I've participated in, digital as well as over a beer on a pub. People from here, here being Sweden, find it hard to accept that there should exist unique aspects of our language, ad that it therefore lends itself better or worse to certain types of expressions.

Now, with the supreme arrogance only the ignorant can afford, Swedish people feel secure in their absolute knowledge that only they are able to find, and refute, nuances in a language they've grown up with since birth. A foreigner noticing the stark contrast to another reality taken for granted is either blind, deaf or otherwise linguistically deficient. Or, maybe, we just happen to be blind ourselves.

So I once again state my opinion that different languages work best with different styles of stories, and every story has a style, and every translation is, for that reason, either a transformation into an environment where that style is lost or misunderstood, or an interpretation where the translation is no longer entirely linguistically true to the original.

When you can, read in the original language, because language has style. Whether you like that style or not is, of course, entirely a matter of your own personal taste.

Rewriting

So I am back to rewriting.

Having stated earlier that I prefer plot over character, if I have to choose at all, I will remake the novel to reflect this better. Rather than being the story of a person I will write a story of events, ie plot.

Needless to say the working title needs to be changed as well. Instead of being about Arthur it will concern itself with what happens around him, and in his wake. Should paradoxically enough give me more time to flesh out a few other characters.

New workspace

Or rather a renewed one. I've spent the last day migrating my laptop from Win XP to Kubuntu Linux. There were a few mishaps, mostly a result of my not having touched a Unix system these last two years, and one major one resulting from brain dead information.

After spending a couple of hours clicking right and left, watching in fascination how everything went up like a breeze with little or no problems, I was left with convincing my laptop to communicate with our networked printer. That might seem like a minor issue, but I write for pleasure, my dream of authorship and mandatory assignments alike. Being unable to convert digital data to paper is therefore a rather major dilemma.

Enter brain dead. After scouring the web for information and installing all kinds of defunct software as well as redundant, but perfectly working, ones I ended up with the knowledge that I was supposed to point my web browser to my own laptop in order to get to an installation interface. Now, the interface was by no means difficult to use -- if you knew beforehand what you were supposed to do. This was later proven by the five minutes I needed to add printing capacity to another laptop. Of course it helped that I am more than a little bit familiar with computer networks and therefore no stranger to force the necessary information out of a router, after which identifying the printer server became a lot easier. Static IP on said server and I knew I would not have to hunt the printer down like an elusive prey every time the DHCP server decided to assign a new address to it. Opening a socket to a remote unit is also something I have done quite a few times, which ended up, implicitly giving me the correct protocol, and I was set to go.

Now, what in all bleeding hells would have been so difficult about making a small setup software that scanned the local network for potential networked printers? After all, all other magic with the installation, some of which I had never expected to see working, worked like a dream.

Brain dead!

End rant.

Second draft subbed

It took a while longer than expected, but finally the second draft of our little non-fic project has been submitted. Now we have to wait for customer feedback and make changes accordingly.