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Golden Beets and the TSA
I manage to hold up airport security on almost every trip. The other weekend, it was a half-gallon Ball canning jar with raw, whole gold beets. "I'm gonna have to run this through again," the agent...
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The Chrysanthemum and the Cultural Faux-pas
When translating and localizing any work or product involving spoken or written language, a variety of factors must be taken into consideration; when forging an accurate approximation of the original...
View ArticleMush Pots and Mosh Pits
The other day, we had a moment when The Captain (our lead project manager) said "mush pot" and then I, among others, misheard it as "mosh pit." When I poked my head into The Captain's office to ask...
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Canada Geese and Notaries Public
When I moved from Texas to Seattle one summer in the late '80s, among other impressive sights was that of large numbers of geese on a Lake Washington beach and pier. “Wow. Look at all those wonderful...
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Rituals are for Mapmakers
Our latest poll was an open-ended question: What is your favorite cultural celebration, holiday, or family ritual? It can be anything, from ethnic or community festivities to your uncle's annual...
View ArticleWoman stranded with rabbit
Recently, Pinyin Minion and I (the Verbivore) were talking about our Mid-Autumn Festival after our "what's your favorite ritual" survey question. She and I have cultures with similar folklore...
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Skeuomorphs and the Floppy Disk Icon
So the other week, Anagram Manager was looking around for our chief tech officer (the Code Commander) to ask him a nerdy question. The question? Why the Save button still has a disk image even though...
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Ramadan Memories
Awhile back, we asked Glyphers about their favorite cultural celebration, holiday, or family ritual. Our Linguist Whisperer (one of our project managers) moved here from Morocco a few months ago and...
View ArticleInternational Jokes
At Glyph, like any extreme subculture, we've developed a laundry list of long running inside jokes. There's not enough space here to go into detail, but in the past few months, they have been mostly...
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Pretend you live here
It was about 9 p.m. and I was in Oakland looking at my other mama's house artifacts. "Pretend you live here," she said earlier, telling me to poke around for whatever I might need. She's groggy and...
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Misheard Lyrics
One of our recent staff polls was about misheard lyrics... What lyrics have you misheard, whether as a kid or later in life? Here's a selection of responses from Glyphers: Preying Semanticist: "'Deck...
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We are made of water
My friend Hollywood and I had breakfast at sunrise on Sunday, watching waves come in to the Oregon shore. It was a safe enough distance to talk about the ocean without it eavesdropping on us. We were...
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There’s a New Microwave in Town!
Glyph has a brand new microwave and shiny toaster. This is yet another way we know our company is growing – we've upgraded to a larger and more effective microwave, with a sensor mode that decides your...
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The Blue Lotus
One of our newer coworkers, Jacques, came in to work in a Tintin shirt the other week. I was really excited to recognize the specific book from which the design came – The Blue Lotus, fifth installment...
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The Fruit Exchange
There's a fruit exchange at Glyph this week. Wait, is this like Secret Santa where each person submits and retrieves a random fruit from the pool?...Or is this less formal, like saying, "Yo, I might...
View ArticleFall meet-up
One of our language teachers has just flown back to Europe, after a weeklong visit to Glyph Headquarters and the company retreat. She made a (temporary) move to Germany for non-Glyph reasons, but...
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Mah-jongg Dreams
Pinyin Minion and I have decided (kind of on impulse) to learn mah-jongg – a 4-player Chinese tile game. We need one person for each of the four cardinal directions, and we're slowly gathering possible...
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Mama at the Airport
The other week at lunch, we talked about international travel and navigating airports... what would it be like as a non-English speaker trying to transfer flights or find baggage claim? This subject...
View ArticleA snapshot of quality assurance
Lately, our teams have been working hard on an extremely large collection of content for a high-profile client. With so many people involved on the same large project, our biggest priority is to have a...
View ArticleJapanese Quick Language Lesson Video
Glyph Language Services presents: Quick Language Lessons Glyph Language Services offers a wide spectrum of linguistic services, one of which is language teaching. In this video, one of our Japanese...
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