Category: Instructional

Lomoji: A New Tool for Polyglots

I often make the analogy that trying to be a polyglot in an English-speaking country is like trying to maintain a hobby for keeping igloos somewhere non-polar. Without year-round cold, you either have to keep adding snow, or watch in resignation as your bespoke collection of icy enclosures melt away.

Language atrophy happens especially quickly for us English speakers because everywhere, it’s hot. It’s far more likely the person you’re talking to can speak English better than you can speak their native language or they underestimate your abilities. So chances are that unless you’re already super fluent in another language, whenever you try to practice it, you’ll very likely get a, “Wow! Your [insert language] is very good!” and the interaction will resume in English. (Ugh.) And even though I live in New York City, it’s still an effort to keep all of my igloos from turning into puddles of mush.

So I keep adding snow every day (i.e. artificially force exposure to all my languages constantly). Like a good polyglot, I have Google Translate on the first page of my iPhone’s home screen. Whenever I have random moments of pause throughout the day when I realize, “Wait. How would you say [word/phrase] in [language A]?” I’ll stick it into Translate for a quick answer.

It's sometimes a pain in the butt using Google Translate as a polyglot as it's often the case that you have to manually translate multiple times.
One translation at a time?! Ugh.

But wait. I’ve also just realized I don’t know how to say that in B, C, D, or E! Okay. Hit X. Select B. Cool. Hit X. Select C. Cool. Hit X. Select D… this quickly gets tiresome because each time, you have translate each one manually. The Google Translate app only keeps a history of your five last-translated languages.

Gif of Kim Kardashian going, "Like, I'm so annoyed."
Okay. Maybe not that annoying.

As we polyglots tend to, I “dabble” quite a bit  — enough to notice how frequently I was having to scroll back to that huge list even for my most-used languages. On a random day when I wanted a reminder of how to say “shelf” in Spanish I had to manually select from the master list it because it had gotten bumped off the last-used list by random forays into Danish and Portuguese.

WHERE'S MY SPANISH?
WHERE’S MY SPANISH?

I wanted something where I could select ALL the languages I’m currently “dabbling” in so I could view translations for all of them concurrently. Well, I had never implemented the Google Translate API in anything before, so I took this as a learning opportunity. I went ahead and created myself an account on Google Cloud Console, got myself an API key, and started playing.

The result is Lomoji.

Screenshot of Lomoji, an iOS app that shows a text box and a green button with a back and forth arrow to indicate translate action.
Lomoji main screen

Lomoji is a small React Native app that lets you select multiple target languages, and persist them in AsyncStorage so that whenever you perform a translate action, with just a quick glance, you’re instantly reminded of how to say them in all your languages. The languages only disappear when you uncheck them; not because you happened to translate a few small things in five other languages prior.

First select the language you want to translate from…

 

Selecting languages in Lomoji
Selecting a “from” language

Then select your destination language(s)…

Dropdown menu of languages in Lomoji
Dropdown menu of “to” languages

After hitting “confirm,” we have our nice list of igloos!

Selected from and to languages in settings panel
Completed settings panel

Enter the string to be translated and… voilà!

Panel showing final translations in all destination languages
Panel showing final translations in all destination languages

THAT’S WHUT I’M TALKIN’ ABOUT.

Beyoncé throwing up two sign of the horns.
WHOOP, WHOOOP!

Google Translate makes it easy to get an updated list of all available languages. As noted in their documentation, you just make an API request that Translate responds to with a JSON object to get the most up-to-date list. So I made the component so that it asynchronously checks the list of available languages, and updates the internal list before defaulting to loading the in-built store of languages in case that fails. This makes it future-friendly as support for languages are added (or perhaps removed) by Google.

async componentDidMount() {
    await axios
        // Get most recent list of langs from Google.
        .get(`https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2/languages?key=${config.apiKey}&target=en`)
        // If that was successful, set our internal state.
        .then((result) => {
            this.setState({
                langList: result.data.languages
            });
	})
        // If that fails, use default built-in list of languages.
	.catch((err) => {
	    this.setState({
		langList: languages.data.languages
             });
            alert(`Unable to retrieve list of languages from Google Translate.\nLocal list used instead.\n\n${err}`);
        });
            this.setState({assetsLoaded: true});
}

But that’s it for now! I think in a future iteration, it would definitely make for a more fluid user experience if the input language were detected automatically. Still a few loose ends to tie up but I was too excited not to not post about it. I’ll update as I move toward publishing it!

Oh, and if you’re wondering why I decided to call it “Lomoji,” it’s because in Korean, “X (eu)ro muoji” (X[으]로 뭐지?), where X is a language, is a phrasal suffix that roughly translates to, “How would you say it in X?” I simplified it and anglicized it to make it catchy to Western ears.

So “Yeongeo ro muoji?” (영어로 뭐지?),  where “yeongeo (영어)” is “English,” would translate to, “How would you say that in English?” Clever?

Hacking Music Accessibility Via Realtime Stenography (and Code): Recap

This March, I got to present at the NYC Monthly Music Hackathon about my experiments using stenography and coding to enhance accessibility of auditory information for those with hearing loss who use real-time captioning as a form of accommodation.

Photo of Stanley in front of an audience. On the left side there's a screen with the title slide of his talk and on the right is Stanley standing in front of another screen, to which he's transcribing himself.
If you think that looks like I’m transcribing myself, you would be correct!

Problem

While sign language interpreters can use their body and expressive, animated signing to convey the tone, rhythm, and various other qualities of music, real-time captioners are comparatively limited in their expressive capabilities. Deaf attendees who primarily use spoken language typically must rely on a combination of their residual hearing, vibrations, cues from the performer or audience members, and parenthetical descriptions inserted by the captioner to piece together a mental representation of what’s being heard.

Here’s a short clip of what live captioning looks like in action:

Despite having provided real-time captioning services for almost six years now, this was something I hadn’t considered at all until I was hired by Spotify to caption their February Monthly Music Hackathon. A deaf attendee, Jay Zimmerman, approached me and requested that I describe the audio segments during the demo portion as best I can. As a musician who had lost his hearing later in life, Jay wanted and appreciated a greater level of access than the simple music note, as often seen in TV closed captions, or simply the lyrics on screen. So I did the best that I could:

On screen, it shows a bunch of dialogue and then parentheticals for [ Big Room House/EDM ] and [ Tiësto, Martin Garrix - "The Only Way Is Up" ].
Stanley’s captioning screen showing captions from Spotify’s Monthly Music Hackathon event.
For me, this wasn’t good enough. Even when the captioner knows a song well enough to nail the title, it still feels lacking. It just isn’t a suitable accommodation for someone who truly wants to experience the acoustic information in a more direct way. There’s just too much information to convey to sum it up in short parentheticals. Additionally, when I am captioning, I’ve found it difficult to come up with accurate and succinct descriptions on the spot when things are often happening very quickly in live settings.

  Brainstorming and Thought Process

A while back, I wrote a post on my project, Aloft. In short, it’s a cloud based caption delivery app which enables participants to access stenographers’ live transcription output on any Internet-enabled device with a modern browser. Its main use case was originally for those participating in events or lectures remotely:

Screenshot of a remote participant watching the keynote address at WordCamp US Nashville depicting a PowerPoint slide and the realtime captions underneath.
Example of Aloft being used by a remote conference participant.

But I actually use Aloft in all of my captioning work, including those that are on site where I hook up to a projector, drag the participant view page over to the monitor, and display it full screened like so:

Photo depicts a man in a wheelchair giving a talk while a full-screen view of live transcription is visible behind him.
Example of Aloft being used on-site at the March NYC Monthly Music Hackathon. Speaker: Patrick Anderson.
Image of a large audience at a tech conference watching the keynote with live captions above the presentation slides.
Example of using Aloft for large-event captioning at WordCamp US 2017.

Well, one of the great benefits of working with software you wrote yourself is that, as you encounter different needs, you are free to modify your tools to meet them. In fact, one of the reasons I created Aloft was because of how anoyingly restrictive and unintuitive commercial legal-transcription viewing platforms typically are with respect to seemingly simple things like being able to change the font size or the color palette.

So that got me thinking…

What if we could simultaneously convey the transcription of spoken content in addition to some visual representation of the audio?

Initial Research

At first, I didn’t know where to start since, at the time, I hadn’t really dealt with computer audio processing at all so I began with researching different JavaScript packages (since it needed to be web compatible and I didn’t really want to deal with having to run code through an interpreter). I came across a package called p5.js, which a lot of the folks at the hackathon seemed to have either heard about already, or used in the past. The Frequency Spectrum add-on seemed pretty promising.

 

Screenshot depicting the demo page for the Frequency Spectrum add-on. A frequency spectrogram (squiggly lines on a light gray background) and some JavaScript code beneath are visible.
P5’s Frequency Spectrum add-on

Implementation

So I created it a special route in Express so it would only live on a page that I could point the browser to only during the occasions I need it. We don’t want all those extra scripts loading when I’m doing just normal captioning!

app.get('/soundbar/:user/:event', function(req, res) {
	Event.findOne({'user': req.params.user, 'event': req.params.event},
	function(err, event) {
		if(err) {
			throw err;
		} else {
			res.render('watch-soundbar', {
				'user': req.params.user,
				'event': req.params.event,
				'marker': req.params.marker
			});
		}
	});
});

So now, I would I would load the libraries only if I went to localhost:4000/soundbar/stanley/monthly-music-hackathon.

Then, it was just a matter of importing the libraries into the view, and initiating p5 via the code provided on the demo page with some minor modifications.

var mic, fft;

function setup() {
	let canvas = createCanvas(windowWidth, windowWidth/5);
	canvas.parent('waveform');

	noFill();

	mic = new p5.AudioIn();
	mic.start();
	mic.amp(10);
	fft = new p5.FFT();
	fft.setInput(mic);
}

function draw() {
	background('#{bgColor}');
	stroke('#{fontColor}');
	strokeWeight(3);

	var spectrum = fft.analyze();

	beginShape();

	for (i = 0; i<spectrum.length; i++) {
		vertex(i, map(spectrum[i], 0, 255, height, 100) );
	}

	endShape();
}

function windowResized() {
	resizeCanvas(windowWidth, 250);
}

A few changes I made were: I modified the canvas width so that it automatically calculates the height and width based on the parent window, so it would always be proportional to the size of the size of the captioning screen. Since we don’t know what the foreground and background colors are, as they’re dynamically set by an Angular service, I passed those in as variables that are pulled from local storage via an Angular service, and sent to the controller. Finally, I passed in the div to which it should display and we have a working audio waveform at the bottom of the screen!

Screenshot of a web page displaying real-time transcriptions with a squiggly-line audio frequency spectrum displayed at the bottom.
View of frequency spectrum at the bottom of the Aloft viewer page.

But, wait a minute. What if I don’t want to see the “soundbar” all the time? What if I only want it to be displayed when appropriate, as in during a live musical demo or performance? Well, why don’t I create a command that I can invoke from the steno machine that would turn it on and off? So I arbitrarily decided that &SOUNDBAR would be the flag I would use to turn the soundbar on and implemented it like so:

// If the number of &SOUNDBARs is even, toggle between show and hide.

if ((text.match(/&SOUNDBAR/g) || []).length % 2 === 0)  {
	soundbar.style.display = 'none';
	captionArea.style.paddingBottom = '4rem';
} else {
	soundbar.style.display = 'inherit';
	captionArea.style.paddingBottom = '0rem';
}

So essentially, every time the backend receives text, before it modifies the DOM, it uses a regular expression to check to see whether the sequence of characters matches &SOUNDBAR, and if the number of &SOUNDBARs present in the transcript is odd, then display. If it’s even, hide it. Probably not the most optimal solution in that the microphone is activated and also performing the calculations in the background whether or not the soundbar is visible, but it works for now.

Now, the soundbar remains hidden until I choose to show it by writing SPWA*R on my steno machine, which spits out &SOUNDBAR in the transcript. As soon as I don’t need it anymore, I write SPWA*R again, the number of soundbar flags on the page is now even, and it hides the div.

Screenshot of two screens, one of the captioner's screen where you can see the captioner wrote "&SOUNDBAR" to flag Aloft to open the soundbar. On the second screenshot, you can see the squiggly frequency spectrum "soundbar" displayed.
How the &SOUNDBAR flag is used by the captioner to display the frequency spectrum.

An obvious drawback is that if the consumer wants a copy of the transcript, I would have to go back and delete all the occurrences of &SOUNDBAR but that’s a problem to solve for another day. Another problem is that p5 is always running in the background even when the div is hidden. This is a limitation of package itself, unfortunately, since I’ve encountered trouble loading it via some event handler as opposed to how it was designed to work: on page load.

A limitation that Jay pointed out was that, while the soundbar solution is great for visualizing instantaneous peaks, what’s loud or quiet at the current moment. It’s relatively poor at visualizing temporally, what’s going on. So I played around with another possible solution, this time using a different Web Audio-based package called Awesome Realtime Audio Visualizer in JS, HTML created by Will Brickner. His audio visualization spectrogram conveys the frequency on the vertical axis, time on the horizontal axis, and intensity through pixel brightness. When the visualizer is activated, a yellow line scans across the screen from left to right, drawing a spectrogram in real-time, giving one more of a temporal idea of the auditory content:

Screenshot of a captioning window with a dynamic audio spectrogram as the complete background.
Demo of spectrogram with “Crowd Control” – Fisher playing in the background.

In contrast to the soundbar, this visualizer takes up the whole screen and becomes the entire page’s background. In the view, it lives as an HTML canvas object. As with the soundbar example, this implementation also has its own route (/spectrogram) and it also allows the captioner to turn the audio visualizer on and off depending on need.

Final Thoughts and Next Steps

The biggest challenge is really being able to convey enough depth to make the experience as immersive and inclusive as possible. While these two solutions are a great start, perhaps combining them somehow into one page would let the user benefit from both formats. Or better yet, incorporate a more-complex visualizer to allow for more bandwidth. As Jay puts it:

Both give a sense of amplitude and pitch, with amplitude being easier to perceive so we can see when sound is happening and whether or not it is soft or loud.

The issue with frequency/pitch information is how to make it clear and easy to decipher, which leads to linear vs exponential or logarithmic graphing.

Easiest way to comprehend pitch/frequency quickly is on the vertical, so high pitches are high and low pitches are low.

So what if we could harness a different axis like color to indicate volume, leaving the y-axis free for pitch and the x-axis to denote time? What if instead of a line or a sequence of bars, we had a 3D object that morphs and changes in size in response to different volumes or frequencies? But then that leads to the question: at what level of complexity would the visuals negatively affect the legibility of the captioning?

Vragen Van Theo

Several months ago, I had a pretty comprehensive discussion with a Dutch colleague, Theo Tomassen, who had sent me questions regarding my general procedures as a captioner. Seeing as how there is very little material on stenography on the Internet in the Dutch language, I thought I’d share his questions and my responses on my blog. It is still not complete as Theo is working on his responses to my questions I posed in response but I will post a follow-up as soon as I have them! What follows is completely in Dutch. If you don’t speak Dutch but would like to know what was said, there’s always Google Translate :]. Also, please keep in mind that Dutch is not my native tongue.

Een paar maanden geleden, had ik een hele uitgebreide discussie met een Nederlandse collega, Theo Tomassen, die stuurde mij een aantal vragen over mijn algemene procedures als schrijftolk. Aangezien het gebrek aan publicaties hierover in de Nederlandse taal op het internet, heb ik besloten om zijn vragen en mijn antwoorden op mijn blog te delen. Het is nog niet klaar want ik wacht op Theos antwoorden naar aanleiding van mijn vragen maar ik post ze hierop zodra ik ze heb! Het navolgende is compleet in Nederlands. Als je geen Nederlands spreekt en je wilt graag even weten wat er gezegd werd, is er natuurlijk altijd Google Translate :]. Bovendien, hou er rekening mee dat het Nederlands niet mijn moedertaal is.

THEO: Mijn belangrijkste vraag is wat langer, die moet ik even inleiden. Deze heeft betrekking op finger spelling. Ik heb je verteld dat ik voor Nederlands werk als gediplomeerd schrijftolk (“CARTer”) voor doven en slechthorenden. De vraag naar Engels is groot, maar er zijn maar weinig schrijftolken die dat willen/kunnen. Echter, het Engels wordt vaak gesproken door Nederlanders. Dit betekent dat er regelmatig Nederlandse instellingen, plaatsnamen, namen van personen worden genoemd die uiteraard niet in mijn dictionary staan.

STANLEY: Dat is geweldig te horen! Ik vond Amsterdam heel, heel prachtig wanneer ik deze zomer op bezoek was. Ik begon over te denken de mogelijkheid van misschien daarheen verhuizen en werken maar voor nu, geniet ik van het leven in New York. In Januari, woon ik hier pas twee jaren. Ik kom oorspronkelijk uit Seattle.

THEO: Stel dat een spreker zou zeggen: “Ladies and gentlemen, I should now like to give the floor to Theo Tomassen, president of the Nederlandse Schrijftolken Vereniging.” Ik weet niet zeker of het praktisch om dergelijke woordklonten steeds allemaal te vingerspellen op de Diamante. Ik weet dat Stenograph een QWERTY-toetsenbord heeft dat je op de Diamante kan bevestigen. Ik kan heel snel typen op QWERTY, die snelheid zal ik nooit halen op de Diamante.

STANLEY: Wat mij betreft, zou ik nooit een extern toetsenbord gebruiken. Je zou wat heel tijd vergen voor wisselen tussen de beide als je moet dat vaak doen.

THEO: Vraag dus: is het een rare werkwijze om te wisselen tussen de Diamante en dat toetsenbord in dergelijke gevallen? Ik snap dat dit op een snelheid van 230 woorden per minuut misschien lastig is, maar in Nederland onderbreken de tolken de spreker als ze op dit soort abnormale snelheden praten.

STANLEY: Zoals ik al zei: Ik zou alleen op het klaarmaken (prep) en op fingerspelling vertrouwen voor woorden die ik niet in mijn woordenboek heb.

THEO: Als je aan het CART’en bent en er valt een woord waarvan je sterk het vermoeden hebt dat het niet in je woordenboek staat, vingerspel je dat dan of kies je een synoniem?

STANLEY: Bijna altijd fingerspelling. Ik zou een synoniem kiezen alleen als ik geen andere keuze heb (bv, de spreker gaat te snel of ik kon niet het precies woord horen).

THEO: Schrijf je tijdens het CART’en alle hoofdletters —

STANLEY: Nee. Mixed case, altijd ;].

THEO: contractions voor “he’s” en dergelijke?

STANLEY: Ik probeer doorgaans, een echte woordelijk verslag te maken dus schrijf ik, alles, zo veel mogelijk, precies hoe ik het heb gehoord, zelfs wanneer wat de spreker zegt is formeel niet goed Engels. Als hij “‘cause” zegt ipv “because”, dat is wat ik in de transcriptie zet. Want deze (in tegenstelling tot situaties in de rechtbank) zijn geen officieele verslagen, is het niet noodzakelijk altijd aan formele grammaticaregels te houden.

THEO: Als bijvoorbeeld een instelling “City Health Care” heet en het tempo is voor mij hoog, schrijf ik “city health care”.  Ik weet dat er een Case CATalyst een aanslag is om bijvoorbeeld de vorige drie woorden een hoofdletter te geven, maar het is toch allemaal weer bagage.

STANLEY: Ja, doorgaans als de snelheid is te hoog, zorg ik me niet zo veel over kleine details zoals hoofdlettergebruik. Het belangrijkste ding op dat moment is alle de woorden krijgen.

Als het mogelijk is, je moet gebruiken alleen macros die veranderingen maken voordat de text verzonden wordt. Met andere woorden, gebruik functies die het volgend woord een hoofdletter geeft (en niet het vorig). Met meeste systemen zoals Text-On-Top of broadcast encoders, je bewerkingen zullen niet weerspiegeld worden als je probeert naderhand veranderingen te maken. Laat me eens weten als je dit niet begrijpt.

THEO: Heb je bepaalde dingen in je dictionary gedefinieerd die bij het CART’en enorm handig zijn en tijdwinst opleveren?

STANLEY:

  • Een stroke voor het toevoegen van definities.
  • Gemeenschappelijke symbolen zoals @, $, _, %, <, >, <=, >=, -, –, =, !, daarnaast Griekse letteren, en definities voor Spaanse en Duitse letteren: á, é, ë, ä, enz. Ik heb zelfs alle de emoji gedefinieerd.

THEO: Wat is jouw mening over briefs? Als ik op de Facebook-pagina Supporting Court Reporter Students kijk, zie ik dat veel mensen voor de meest gekke termen een brief vragen. Termen die je niet zo vaak tegenkomt. Natuurlijk leveren briefs tijdwinst op, maar ik briefs voor zeldzamere termen onthoud ik toch niet.

STANLEY: Als ik moet een woord of zin meer dan twee keer schrijven, dat bestaat uit meer dan twee toetsenaanslagen, maak ik een brief. Ik heb weinig of geen probleem om veel briefs te memoriseren maar ieder mens is uniek qua talent dus ik denk dat je moet doen wat is voor jou de makkelijkste.

Ik wil je laten weten dat je moet niet alles wat je leest op die pagina serieus nemen. Hoewel er goede en handige informatie is, zit er heel veel advies dat het niet waar is, gebaseerd op ouderwetse meningen. Je moet altijd je eigen oordeel vormen nadat je een aantal mensen geraadpleegd hebt.

THEO: Zijn er dingen die je op de opleiding voor court reporter leert, maar die je werkelijk nooit zult toepassen in CART? Ik denk bijvoorbeeld aan “8 o’clock”. Dat zou je dan moeten schrijven als “8:00 o’clock”. Nu heb ik in mijn dictionary aanslagen gedefinieerd als /8 /KHRBG, dat wordt dan “8:00 o’clock”. Maar vanuit CART gezien vind ik het een beetje van de zotte om in alle gevallen aan een hypercorrecte schrijfwijze vast te houden. Of zie je dat anders?

STANLEY: Ik heb geen ervaring met in de rechtbank werken dus ik voel  me niet bevoegd/gekwalificeerd om deze vraag te beantwoorden.

THEO: Een beetje aansluitend op vraag 6: heb je misschien nog suggesties hoe ik mijn speedbuilding-traject zou kunnen aanpakken?

STANLEY: Je moet met verscheidene materialen oefenen. Wat is belangrijkste is niet te vervelen. Ik luisterde vaak naar de uitzendingen van howstuffworks.com. Ze zijn vrij op iTunes om te downloaden. Vind inhoud waarin je bijzonder geïnteresseerd bent. Je hoeft niet naar dezelfde saaie drills opnieuw en opnieuw luisteren. Kies, bv, een Engelse televisieprogramma of radioprogramma dat je leuk vindt en doe dat maar.

THEO: Ik zal nooit in mijn leven werk doen dat op court reporting lijkt, maar begin straks gelijk met CART’en. Het heeft voor mij dus geen zin om een heel goede court reporter te worden die niet kan CART’en: stel dat een snel gesproken tekst over “Chicago” gaat en ik heb geen brief daarvoor. Ik kan zou dan als court reporter telkens een “C” kunnen aanslaan, want ik onthoud wel dat het om “Chicago” gaat. Maar als CART’er kom ik daar niet mee weg. Ik moet/wil dus nu al op CART-kwaliteit studeren: de output moet een volledig leesbare tekst zijn, waarbij ik uiteraard een paar fouten wel accepteer. Maar een hele reeks untranslates die nog wel te lezen zijn voor een court reporter, slaat natuurlijk nergens op voor CART’en.

STANLEY: Ja, dat is heel onaanvaardbaar voor schrijftolken. Je moet voor de eerste keer, de woord dat bestaat niet in je woordenboek fingerspellen en laat de software je een briefsuggestie geven. Wanneer je een moment hebt, maak je dan een definitie die ga in je dict te blijven.

THEO: Zijn er nog bepaalde realtime-instellingen in Case CATalyst die ik beslist goed moet bekijken omdat ze handig zijn? Misschien gebruik je Eclipse of iets anders, maar ik denk dat er veel functies zijn die elkaar veel overlappen?

STANLEY: Kun je hier, specifieker zijn?

THEO: Welke setup gebruik je om de tekst draadloos door te sturen naar bijvoorbeeld een tablet van een klant? Case CATalyst heeft nu CASEview, maar  de licentie daarvan ik niet echt goedkoop. En ik moet volgens mij een wifi-verbinding hebben, wat ook niet overal mogelijk is.

STANLEY: In het verleden, ik gebruikte de vrije versie van Bridge maar ik heb onlangs een programma geschreven die voert deze functie uit! Bovendien is het vrij (voor nu). Je kan mijn niet-zo-korte beschrijving op mijn website lezen. http://blog.stanographer.com/aloft.

THEO: Voor mijn Nederlandse werk gebruik ik Text On Top voor een draadloze verbinding. Die kan ik ook met Case CATalyst gebruiken, maar de lay-out wordt dan niet overgenomen. Als ik een Enter geef, gebeurt er niets op het scherm van de klant. De ontwikkelaar heeft uitgelegd waarom dat zo is, gaat wat ver om dat allemaal uit te leggen. Maar het is wel zo.

STANLEY: Ik denk dat er een instelling is voor “verbatim mode” of zo waarbij je moet ctrl + enter drukken om een nieuwe lijn te maken en niet gewoon enter. Maar ik gebruik CC niet, dus ik weet niet wat zou dat gedrag kunnen veroorzaken.

THEO: Ik heb je videoblog over de Lightspeed gezien. Is het iets om te overwegen?

STANLEY: YES! I LOVE IT! Heb je specifieke vragen erover? Mijn god, ik kan niet langer in deze taal praten. Haha.

Stan’s Quick and Dirty Video: How Steno Works

Hey! Sorry for the lack of updates. But I wanted to share a new video I just made about how steno works for those who still don’t know. I wanted to make a very quick video that summed up all the main points in a way that was short and to the point so one of my students could use it for a class project about what it’s like in the day of a deaf person. Enjoy!

A Different Kind of Steno Hell: German

If you’ve missed the blatantly self-promotional vomit I’ve been unabashedly spewing all over Jade’s Stenoquery and on my own social media pages, you might not have known that I have accepted quite the unique challenge this semester: Captioning a semester-long intensive German class. I feel like I can barely manage to pull my head out of my ass when writing English realtime, but GERMAN?! HOW DO YOU EVEN? Besides not speaking the language at all prior to starting the class, stenoing a language class as opposed to a monolingual foreign language environment presents a number of unique problems that compound on the scads of details that we stenos are constantly juggling with in our heads whilst taking down just one language.

Let me explain why this situation is, without exaggeration, a venerable shitshow.

FML Subway
The subway lines I take to work.

1. Language classes are bilingual environments.

You’re dealing with two sets of vocabularies and trying to prevent their corresponding dictionaries from overlapping because you constantly need access to the entirety of each at all times. You might be tempted to assign EUBG for “ich” but that’s your -ic. Sie and sie? Well, SAOE is “see” and SAO*E is “sea.” ES can’t be “es” because ES is “he is.” TKU can’t be “du” because it’s “did you.” The list goes on and on. How the hell do you brief anything? If you’re a brief heavy writer like I am, pretty much all simple strokes are used up, including those containing the asterisk. What is one to do? I guess I don’t have that many strokes containing the number bar.

Solution: NUMBER BAR IT IS. Thus, ich = #EU, ich bin = #EUB, du = #2KU, sie = #150E, Sie = #150*E, etc. Thankfully if it’s multistroke, the German entry will seldom conflict with an English entry so for those you can just write them normally. TKPWE/SEUBGT for Gesicht won’t really conflict with anything in English. Nor will PHAOURT/HREURBG/SAOEUTS for mütterlicherseits.

Sometimes, I just define the English outline for certain words that look enough like English and mean the same thing in German, which, consequently means that while I’m writing, random German words sometimes pop up. But since they look enough like their English counterparts, I don’t worry about it being confusing. It just looks kinda ugly having English text with random capitalized nouns and German here and there: “I have a nice Präsentation for you today. But before that, kann you all turn in your completed Handouts?” But you can only do so much, ja?

2. Special characters.

It’s logical to expect heavy reliance on fingerspelling in a foreign language class but what if the word contains a vowel with an umlaut or the eszett (ß)? These letters make important morphological distinctions in German. “Bruder” is just one brother but “Brüder” is plural. Es gibt hier ein Apfel aber ich kann noch drei Äpfel in meiner Tasche haben (There is an apple here but I can have three more apples in my bag). You can’t just stick in the non-umlauted version because many words differentiate themselves solely by the presence of the two dots.

Solution: Make additional fingerspelling letters using some random ass combination of letters. I chose STK* for no reason at all. Thus, STKA* = ä, STKO* = ö, STK*E = ë, STK*U = ü, STK*S = ß, STKO*EU = äu.

3. German phonology doesn’t necessarily map neatly to what we have available on the American steno keyboard.

There are many ways in which German does not “fit” on the English-derived steno keyboard.

  • German has more vowels than English and many words are minimal pairs based on a vowel sound alone. Bruder/Brüder, schon/schön only differ by the raised vowel but some differ by a vowel and maybe something else attached to the end: Zahn/Zähne, Satz/Sätze. English steno theories do not have ways to handle these.

Solution: Reassign English steno combos to German values. Thus, AOU -> ü (Bruder = PWRURD, Brüder = PWRAOURD). AE -> ä (Satz = SATS, Sätze = SAETS). OE -> ö (schon = SHOPB, schön = SHOEPB).

  • German contains certain consonant combos that don’t exist in English: schreiben, schlappen schneit, schwarz.

Solution: Again, make some shit up. SKHR- = schr-/schl-, SKPH- = schn-, SW- = schw-. Thus, SKHRAOEUB = schreib-, SKHRAP = schlap-, SKHRAF = schlaf, SKPHAOEUT = schneit, SWARZ = schwarz.

*I haven’t yet found an instance where having both schr- and schl- represented as SKHR- would create conflict.

  • German morphemes don’t look like English ones, which makes tucking endings and such impossible using conventional English steno theory (The most common endings are not -ing, -ed, and -s/es so you can’t just throw those in intuitively for inflected forms). This fact makes writing German on an English steno machine incredibly sucky because PRACTICALLY EVERYFUCKINGTHING in German has mutable endings or vowels carrying fake IDs.
A
Um, but your passport says “Ä.” SECURRRITY SUHCURITEH!

So how do you avoid having to come back for every damn inflection of a word?

Solution: Assign new values to final consonants that would serve as tucked endings in English. -DZ = -en, -Z = -e, -SZ = -es, -T = -t, *S = –st. Why -Z for -e? Jacked that shit straight from German steno. Thus, HABDZ = hab + en -> haben. SAGDZ = sag + en -> sagen. TRAGZ = trage. TKPWHRAUBZ = glaube. TKPWHRAUBDZ = glauben. If -Z doesn’t “fit” when adding -e, throw in * instead. So dachte becomes TKA*BGT, brachte becomes PWRA*BGT because you can’t fit BGT and -Z in the same stroke, obvs.

But you can have fun with this like in English. Make up a bunch of arbitrary shit that adds endings or phrases if it’s included in a stroke. Like, I’ve made the -Z into an x + Sie phrase ender. So haben Sie becomes HAEBZ, stehen Sie becomes STA*EUPBZ, können Sie becomes KO*EPBZ. -FB and -FT add the accompanying conjugations of haben in certain phrases. Ich habe -> EUFB, wir haben -> WEUFB, sie hat, er hat -> SWRAOEFT, EFT.

  • Condensing syllables.

The reason there’s an asterisk in stehen Sie and können Sie in the above examples of phrasing is because it means I’ve “skipped” a syllable. So, like, kön-nen is KÖN and ste-hen (which is pronounced more like “shtay-hun”) is STAIN. I don’t really have a nice, concise system yet but for now I use * sometimes to condense two syllables, one of which contains a stressed syllable followed by an unstressed schwa-sounding one.

Stehen -> STA*EUPB, können -> KO*EPB, sehen -> SA*EUPB, gehen -> TKPWA*EUPB.

3. Capitalization.

German capitalizes all nouns. Ein Gewitter is “a thunderstorm” while es gewittert means “it is thunderstorming.” Sometimes a noun and a verb stem look the same. Sie fragen means “you ask” but haben Sie Fragen? means “do you have questions?” So every time I write TPRAG, which I’ve defined as “frag-,” I have to take a split second to ask myself whether in this context, it is a noun or a verb to decide if I should hit KPA (cap next) right before.

Say a normally capitalized noun is combined into some compound — yeah, it’s no longer capitalized if it’s not the first word in said compound. “The restaurant” should be written das Restaurant but if you want to say “my favorite restaurant is,” it takes on the prefix Lieblings-. Hence, mein Lieblingsrestaurant ist would be the German equivalent.

This becomes a problem if, say, you’ve made a handy prefix HRAOEBLS for Lieblings-. Eclipse doesn’t have a “force next word to lowercase” command so if you just write having defined RAURPBT as “Restaurant,” you get LieblingsRestaurant — wrong.

Solution: Define everything that’s a compound. Fingerspell like a mothafucka. Define certain things that are commonly said as non-nouns lowercase, that way you can just throw your cap next stroke in before it to make it look right. But the trick is remembering to every-goddamn-time.

keyboard smash
LIEBLINGSLESIJGELLGFDMSDFGMKSDF

4. Not knowing the language.

Most anglophone stenos will tell you (usually with a characteristic balls-out, no-shame, pedantic/elitist/prescriptivist flair — note to U.S. court reporters: Please stop) how crucial having a vast vocabulary is when taking down English speech. Well, lucky you because your English is pretty on point, yeah? Too bad it means koala shit in this context. Of course there will be certain frequently used words and phrases that overlap with English (Think: Schadenfreude, Zeitgeist, gesundheit, etc.), but for the most part, German phonology and syntax differ enough that having an exquisitely developed ear for English will help nichts bis sehr wenig when writing German steno, or any other language steno for that matter.

I have a fairly extensive linguistic background. I graduated from UW with a degree in Linguistics, speak three languages fluently, and have studied four others to varying degrees but German is not one of them. I speak intermediate level Dutch, which I’ve come to learn, resembles German a great deal more than English. It may sound like I’m bragging but all of this, surprisingly, makes little difference. It’s still hard af. For all intents and purposes, I’m as much a beginner as most of the other students in class. The class is mostly taught in German. While the other students can sit there clueless when the teacher says something unfamiliar, I have to get something down. While the others can use class time to practice new words and phrases, I have to have them mastered by the very next time the teacher utters them. I have to constantly draw upon my linguistic knowledge and combine it with what I can infer based on my cute repertoire of German to approximate spellings for the relentless barrage of words I’ve never heard before. I feel constantly under pressure to stay 10 steps ahead everyone else through intense self-study and/or keeping my phone unlocked with Google Translate up at all times.

Just spellchecking.
Oh, just spellchecking you.

One of the ways being a learner has become most painfully apparent is when attempting to accurately transcribe German declensions. If you don’t know what declension (also known as “cases”) is, it’s basically a way certain languages handle grammatical roles in sentences. While analytic languages like English or Chinese rely heavily on word order to convey who does what to whom in a sentence whilst leaving most of the superficial aspects of the words alone (their sound and spelling). Synthetic languages like German tend to do this by forcing you to solve a timed Rubik’s cube every time you hit a noun. Run out of time? Congratulations, you sound like an idiot. English has remnants of a more case-heavy past in the form of subject vs. object pronoun pairs: He/him, she/her, I/me. Well, German has three genders, two numbers, and four cases. So at minimum, an article will generally have 16 forms. Some look the same superficially but serve different functions. The masculine nominative der (the) is the same as the genitive plural — der! It makes word order relatively free compared to English but the drawback is that trying to compose a simple phrase in German is bit like attempting to haul all 20 of your rabid feral cats in a red wagon across a busy intersection.

kitties
Oh, they’ll totally stay like that.

Sie trägt den Pullover

  • SWRAOE/TRAEGT/TKEPB/PHROUFR
  • She is wearing the sweater.

Der Pullover ist grün

  • TKER/PHROUFR/KWR*EUS/TKPWRAOUPB
  • The sweater is green.

Ich habe einen Hund in meinem Haus

  • EUFB/OEUPBD/HUPBD/TPH/PHOEUPL/HAUS **maybe make TPH*PLD in meinem??
  • I have a dog in my house.

Mein Hund ist im (in + den = im) Haus

  • PHOEUPB/HUPBD/KWR*EUS/KWREUPL/HAUS
  • My dog is in the house.

Das ist ein Haus

  • TKAS/OEUPB/HAUS
  • That is a house.

Wofür interessieren Sie sich?

  • WAOUFR/SPW*/SAOERPB/SWRAO*E/SEUFP
  • What are you interested in?

Woher kommst du?

  • WOER/KO*PLTS/#2KU
  • Where are you from?

Ich komme aus Seattle.

  • #EU/KPHA*US/SAOELGTS **Notice I phrased komme aus as KPHA*US. The * is supposed to stand for the -e in komme.
  • I come from Seattle.

The bolded portions of the above examples are to point out the various forms words like “the,” “a/an,” “my,” and “you” take in German. The last example is to illustrate how I applied both phrasing and inflectional principles into a single stroke.

On top of that, Germanic languages tend to stress the first syllable so a lot of times, unless a phrase is uttered very carefully, it’s hard to tell the difference between eine, einer, einen, einem, deine, deiner, deinem, kein, keine, keiner, keinen, keinem because the first syllable gets the stress and the rest goes straight to schwablivion.

Q. So what does all this amount to?

Don't Even Know.
Don’t Even Know.
German Steno
German Steno (Click to embiggen)

A. Some ridiculous fucking crazy shit.

The end. Tschüss (STAOUS)!