What I Learned About the Art of Translation from Doing It

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I started a project to translate the Daodejing from Chinese into English a few months ago. I hadn’t been actively into translating for the better part of a decade, so I had forgotten what the hardest parts were. Trying to get back in saddle reminded me of what I had let slip.

I had forgotten the real impact and difficulty of things like word choice, code switching fatigue, weird grammar, literal versus inferential translation, preserving poetic intent, and other points like keeping track of tone, and consistency.… Read the rest

Common Chengyu – Part 2

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I had previously written about a couple common Chengyu (成语) and decided to follow up with some more which I have heard more commonly in speech. I plan to keep going with this series and add a few more literary Chengyu as we progress.

对牛弹琴

对牛弹琴 – dui4 niu2 tan2 qin2

This Chengyu literally translates as “playing a lute to a cow” or metaphorically in English as “casting pearls before swine”.… Read the rest

It’s Okay To Be Selfish

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The word “selfish” tends to have an extremely negative connotation. When you think of selfishness, you probably think of wanton indulgence at the expense of others, but that isn’t quite the whole picture. This isn’t to say it hasn’t earned its badge for most of its usage, but sometimes, you have to put yourself first.

Reframing What It Means To Be Selfish

Someone who takes and takes, and takes without ever giving back is selfish.… Read the rest

Hack Your Learning: Make Your Studying More Efficient

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One of the biggest breakthroughs I made in school was learning how to learn more efficiently. Many of my classmates would spend hours at a time sitting in the library or across campus staring at the same textbook and going through the same notes over and over. In the beginning I felt I was just being lazy or maybe I had ADHD or something because no matter how I tried, I couldn’t do it.… Read the rest

Fileless Malware 101: The Advent of New Generation Malware

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I previously wrote about another technique malware and ransomware authors were using to obfuscate their infections. Fileless malware is the natural evolution of this and is far scarier for file-based antivirus solutions. These infections have been making the news with Sodinokibi (or Revil), and others.

These malware attacks are coming from more recent exploits which allow them to run what they want in memory without having to touch the disk at all (for the infection itself) as long as Powershell works on the machine.… Read the rest

How to Learn a Language

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I previously wrote a post about what I look for in language learning materials, but I didn’t really go into a huge amount of detail about how to actually use the materials themselves. This article aims to explain my process for learning a language and what worked for me in order to achieve fluency in Mandarin. I use and have used the same techniques and methods for other languages as well, so this will in no way be limited to Chinese only.… Read the rest