Israel's organization of technical/marcom writers and copy editors
I once worked with a fellow who was hard of hearing, and he said that the cause was trauma. For a while, I thought he was like Tommy, the pinball wizard who was struck deaf, dumb, and blind because he witnessed a terrible event. Then I realized that trauma can also refer to a damaging physical blow, or even a damagingly loud noise.
Read MoreTake for example this well-known sentence:וכל המרבה לספר ביציאת מצרים, הרי זה משובח The Hagaddah at chabad.org translates it \"and everyone who discusses the exodus from Egypt at length is praiseworthy.\" The הרי doesn\'t survive translation. And a case could be made that it’s a mere expletive in the sentence, nothing to worry about. But I think that it helps balance the short ending of the sentence against the long subject.
Read MoreTroubles have always been with us, but it’s Rabbi Shmuel Hanagid — the eleventh-century scholar, poet, and Chief Vizier of Grenada — whom the dictionary credits with reporting he worked his way through an occurrence of tsara tsrura, “trouble in a bundle.”
Read MoreThe Targemni website gives “exciting, sensational” as its definition. Morfix, on the other hand, says “inflaming, inciteful.”
Read MoreI asked around and my sister-in-law, a Sabra of a certain age, told me the slogan was used years ago by the Payis lottery. On the Internet, all I found was a single hit, in which Shlomo Hillel (of all people), serving as Speaker of the Knesset in 1988, refers to the phrase as if it’s familiar.
Read MoreIn the news, you often see “exaggerate” used inappropriately to translate "l'hagzim." For example, an Israeli colonel was quoted in the Jerusalem Post as saying, “We did not exaggerate in our use of firepower.” Presumably he didn’t mean exaggeration in the sense of trying to inflate a story, he meant simply “We did not use too much firepower.”
Read MoreThere are two Hebrew translations of “Les Trois Cloches” — one by Ehud Manor and one by Avi Koren. Unlike the English translation, both Hebrew translations leave Jean-François Nicot a Frenchman. They don’t localize him, they foreignize him.
Read MoreEncouraging eleventh-graders to enroll for an educational trip to Poland, a Hebrew letter quoted in Wiktionary says that the trip will surely add an important נדבך (nidbakh) to them personally as citizens of the sovereign state of Israel. The word nidbakh goes back to the Book of Ezra, where King James translates it as “row”: “... with three rows of great stones, and a row of new timber...”
Read MoreSite for Israel's professional tech writing and marcom community. Originally based in what has become Israel's 2nd largest R&D center (Yokneam), Elephant brings together technical and marcom writers from all over Israel. Behind the scenes and between meetings, members stay in contact with job offers and leads, joint projects, and professional assistance.
Using the wrong technical writer is like using a wrench to open a door, it works, but a door knob is better and cheaper. Elephant was started to help match writers and copy editors with companies where their skills match company needs.
