Controlling faces
Surprise, we have a pseudo-anglicism here!
Read moreSurprise, we have a pseudo-anglicism here!
The English language has an extraordinary phrase “face control.” It might come as a surprise to you that the word actually came into English from Russian. It is one example of so-called reborrowing. The term was born in the Russian language during the “wild ’90s” in CIS countries.
Back then, at a time when people in the post-Soviet countries were beginning to make big bucks for the first time, upscale nightclubs were springing up like mushrooms after warm summer rain. Bouncers, usually dressed in crimson jackets, would stand outside each of these nightclubs and allow in only people whose socio-economic status matched the club’s rank. What they were actually performing was what came to be known as “face control.”
Everything foreign was deemed expensive and worthy of respect, so the term itself appeared under the guise of an English phrase, thus suggesting that “face controlling” was something popular in the West, i.e., everyone does it there, so we should do it too because we are upper class. The interesting thing is that foreigners are actually annoyed about such sorting.
The phrase “face control” was to be imported into English later. Actually, due to the fact that it was a “loan phrase,” it was even as feis kontrol. It took some time for English speakers to realize that these were their own English words which had somehow found their way into the Russian language and been transformed. Some English-speaking people might even struggle to guess what it means and you’ll find it hard to find an English dictionary that refers to the term.
Proceeding to stage 2 in fighting the “Object reference not set to an instance of an object” error in Trados Studio
This is the second (and not final yet) part of the post about the multifaceted Object reference not set to an instance of an object error. You can find the first part here.
The error has many causes which means there are many potential ways to get rid of it, too.
If Trados Studio gets started in a regular way and the message about this error appears when you switch between display modes (Projects, Files, Editor in the lower left corner) or dialog boxes, the method below may help sometimes:
All the settings for displaying boxes will be restored to their factory defaults.
In case this method doesn’t help, there are others, and we will tell about them, too.
A few words about the renowned editor and tricky aspects
of the English language
Mary Norris, a copy editor for The New Yorker, shares her thoughts on whether it is necessary to add the possessive case ending ’s to English nouns ending in s or whether adding an apostrophe is enough. Should one write Hercules’ or Hercules’s? Descartes’ or Descartes’s?
This is no idle issue for Mary. She is not only a linguist; by some quirk of fate, her own last name ends in s. Norris’ or Norris’s?
In English, the situation with generally accepted standards is complicated. Thus, every major publishing company has to develop its own regulations or follow any of the already existing style guides.
At The New Yorker, this burden lies with Mary Norris. She works there since as far back as 1978. Due to her thoroughness and diligence, she has been dignified with the title of the Comma Queen. There is even a separate article about her on Wikipedia.
Mary Norris has her own playlist on the YouTube channel of The New Yorker with an obvious name—Comma Queen. It contains 2–3-minute videos where she explains the most amusing aspects of English, such their as a singular pronoun, Oxford commas, who/whom, etc.
A few words about the changes in the new memoQ version
Recently, a new memoQ version has been released—9.4. Key changes:
And a lot of other stuff has been added.
In most cases, projects that have disappeared from Trados Studio can be restored.
Another post about Trados Studio errors. The symptoms of the disease are as follows: one fine day you start Trados Studio, and it displays the “An error occurred whilst trying to determine the file version” message:
You press the OK button (there is nothing else to press here anyway). Trados Studio starts as usual, but the list of projects in the Projects section is pristine: there is not a single project. Trados Studio itself works great though, even your custom shortcuts are still there.
The error can be caused by several reasons. SDL described them in this article. Most likely, Trados Studio is not to blame. A general reason is that something has happened to the project files that were already imported into Trados Studio. When starting, it tried to download them but failed due to some reason.
A list containing possible reasons is provided below, from the easy to the complicated.
1. The easiest thing that could have happened: you’d deleted, renamed, or replaced the folder containing the project files. It’s no wonder that Trados Studio failed to download them—it just couldn’t find them in the accustomed place.
Solution: close Trados Studio, bring the files back to the folder where they were (if they’re not lost for good), and then start Trados Studio again. After that, you’ll have to go down the files of all the projects you need and click the files with the SDLPROJ extension in each of them. These are files with settings storing information on what files belong to the project and where they are—Trados Studio will catch them and “get its memory back.”
2. Another possible reason: something has blocked the access to the files: they are where they have to be, but Trados Studio can’t reach them. Oftentimes, it turns out to be a cold-blooded antivirus program that had found the project files suspicious by mistake.
The solution is obvious: “comfort” your antivirus or discover which program had blocked access to the files.
3. The third reason: the project files are physically damaged. This case is the most difficult one as this issue has nothing to do with software but comes from hardware.
Solution: bring your disk “back to life.”
“Object reference not set to an instance of an object” is a puzzling
and rather unpleasant error in Trados Studio
Object reference not set to an instance of an object is one of the most unpleasant error messages in Trados Studio. Actually, it seems to be coming not from Trados Studio itself but somewhere from .NET. It may appear in other programs, too.
It has a hundred possible reasons, and that what makes it so unpleasant. We’ve just discovered one of those: the message appears when you try to open in Trados Studio an SDLXLIFF file containing segments with a pilcrow.
As a matter of fact, pilcrows are not supposed to be inside segments in the first place, only between them—we should give credit to Studio for that. When it is necessary to split a line right inside the segment, one usually inserts a line break with the help of SHIFT + ENTER. However, as practice shows, anything may happen during the import of files created in other programs into Studio.
In this particular case, no countermeasures can remove the error because the pilcrows can’t be removed. Theoretically, editing of the source text might help, but it is the last refuge of the enthusiast as it may cause problems during further manipulations with the files. By default, the source text is not to be touched.
And how to get rid of this error under “normal” circumstances we’ll tell you later. There is one universal method...
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