Quand un blog accessible dans le pays de son auteur est censure sous d 'autres cieux

Well , few days ago the blog of the colleague naouefl Chaara was not accessible in Tunisia . I tried so many times but it did not work , as it is explained in the following post .Now, strangely and fortunately , it is accessible .

Ma maladie ; mon compagnon depuis 1995

En 1995, J ai découvert que j'avais le lupus . Une maladie dont je n 'avais jamais entendu le nom auparavant . Et un voyage de douleurs , de désespoir commença pour moi . J 'avais 12 ans a ce moment la et je fus hospitalisée pour une longue période a l 'hôpital d'enfants . Jusqu'à ce jour , je me rappelle la grande salle de 8 lits ou je fus alitée: Je ne pourrai jamais oublier les 7 autres enfants qui partageaient ma chambre d'hôpital. Spécialement un garçon qui au début avait ses cheveux et puis les a perdu au fil des jours a cause du traitement de chimiothérapie qu'il subissait . Je me rappelle qu'il était la bas depuis au moins six mois . Les retentissements des sirènes furieuses amenant des patients a l 'institut Salah Azaiz , l'hopital avoisinant résonnent encore dans ma tête . Les mouches , les fourmis, et les cafards étaient nos seuls compagnons le long des longues et chaudes soirées d'été.

Comme je l'ai déjà dit un long voyage de douleurs et de désespoir avait commence pour moi :un traitement de corticoïdes avec toutes les privations avec : régime alimentaire super strict : pas de sucre , pas de sel .. etc et puis on m 'a complétement interdit de sortir au soleil , moi qui habitait au bord d'une mer ou on pouvait nager a l 'époque .C était très dur pour moi , a Ezzahra a l 'époque être in se résumait en une baignade et une partie de beach-ball devant "dar l almane "(la maison des allemands ), puis rentrer se doucher , déjeuner , faire une sieste et puis ressortir après le coucher de soleil , portant ses meilleurs habits et aller au bled(le centre d 'Ezzahra) pour manger une pizza a la sicilienne ( une pizzeria branchée dans le temps ). Chaque soir estival ,tous les jeunes y étaient , debout attendant leurs pizzas , discutant tout en écoutant les tubes musicaux de l 'été . je n 'en avais plus le droit !!!

Puis les corticoïdes et la maladie ont massacré mon corps : des œdèmes, des vergetures , etc ...
J'ai survécu quand même et j 'ai appris a m 'adapter a ma ma maladie et mon nouveau mode de vie jusqu'a ce que j 'ai vécu le pire .

Aujourd'hui je veux vous présenter cette maladie chronique qui est toujours la dans ma vie :

Le lupus est une maladie auto-immune chronique où le système immunitaire s’attaque aux tissus conjonctifs du corps. Le nom latin lupus, ou « loup », aurait été choisi pour faire allusion à l’action destructrice et envahissante de cette mystérieuse maladie.

Le lupus touche principalement les femmes en âge de procréer. On le considère comme une forme d’arthrite puisqu’il engendre de l’inflammation dans les articulations. Toutefois, l’impact de cette maladie rejaillit dans tout le corps par une panoplie de symptômes, qui peuvent paraître insurmontables.

Cause

Dans le lupus, pour des raisons qu’on ignore encore – peut-être un ensemble de facteurs environnementaux, hormonaux et génétiques – l’organisme fabrique des anticorps qui s’attaquent à ses propres tissus sains. Le système immunitaire est un réseau complexe d’organes, de tissus, de cellules et de facteurs circulant dans le sang. Habituellement, il protège l’individu contre les maladies. Ces réactions auto-immunes peuvent être très nuisibles pour le corps et occasionnent d’importantes réactions inflammatoires.

Évolution

Le lupus se caractérise par l’alternance de périodes symptomatiques et de périodes de rémission. Durant les poussées de symptômes, le mal s’exacerbe; les manifestations physiques se multiplient et les analyses sanguines en laboratoire révèlent des anomalies. Puis, les symptômes diminuent peu à peu et disparaissent. Les périodes de rémission peuvent durer des semaines, des mois, et même des années. Bien qu’il s’agisse d’une maladie chronique, la plupart des personnes atteintes de lupus ne seront pas malades continuellement pendant toute leur vie.

Éléments déclencheurs

Une infection virale, le stress, le surmenage et le fait de tomber enceinte ou d’accoucher peuvent déclencher le lupus par un mécanisme qu’on ignore encore (ce qui ne veut pas dire qu’ils en soient la cause). En outre, certains médicaments utilisés pour traiter une autre maladie peuvent déclencher des symptômes de lupus. Ceux-ci disparaissent lorsque la personne cesse de prendre ses médicaments.

Symptômes

Les symptômes varient beaucoup d’une personne à l’autre. Habituellement, la maladie se manifeste par quelques-uns des symptômes suivants.

Symptômes non spécifiques

• Une fatigue extrême.
• Une perte de poids inexpliquée et continue ou un gain de poids causé par l’enflure.
• Des poussées de fièvre inexpliquées.
• Des ganglions enflés.

Symptômes spécifiques

• Une plaque rouge foncé au haut des joues et à la racine du nez en forme de papillon.
• Une éruption surélevée rouge de forme discoïde sur les régions de la peau exposées au soleil.
• Une grande sensibilité au soleil, qui se manifeste par une éruption cutanée pendant ou peu après l’exposition.
• Des ulcères dans la bouche ou les narines.
• Des douleurs et de l’enflure aux articulations.
• Une douleur à la poitrine durant les respirations profondes, et parfois une toux.
• De l’enflure aux jambes.
• Si la maladie touche le coeur, elle peut causer de l’arythmie et de l’insuffisance cardiaque.
• Un état dépressif, de la difficulté à avoir les idées claires et des problèmes de mémoire.
• Des douleurs musculaires.

Autres symptômes

• Une perte de cheveux.
• Des troubles de vision.
• Une grande sensibilité au froid et au stress : les doigts et les orteils bleuissent ou pâlissent facilement.
• De l’urticaire.
• Des maux de tête

Pour en savoir plus cliquer ici

My bookMarx for the day

Ou étions nous?(NOUS? blogueurs Tunisiens((moi aussi :( )). Apparemment, l'écologie et la protection de l 'environnement ne font pas partie de nos priorités encore .

Arab World :Earth Hour Marked accross the Region

Nous avons aussi oublié le jourde la terre seuls Arabasta et Neji Khachnaoui en ont parlé respectivement dans ce post et ce post

Les explosions du métro de Moscou ont fait couler beaucoup d'encre , mais nous comme d'habitude on s'enfiche nous vivons dans un pays paisible ou la sécurité reigne 24/24 et 7/7 . Seul ce billet du blog Revolution Tunisie (blog censuré en Tunisie PS : il ne faut jamais parler de révolution en Tunisie même s'il s'agit de citer un passage dans un livre qui vous a plu on en a parlé..Voici un bon billet de GVO qui parle des attentats de Moscou :
Russie les deux attentats du métro de Moscou sur les blogs russes.

Tunisia: Tunisian Bloggers speak in English (GVO)

My latest post on GVO. To read it click here

April Fish : Don t get trapped !

It is April ,1st, starting from last night I have been wondering what pranks my mom had planned for this year Fools' Day as she is the only one who succeeds in trapping me as I believe whatever story she says : my dog who gave birth to 3 puppies , the carpets that my mom washed and some thieves had stolen , and the list is too long .

Until this hour , my mom did not tell me any story ... but the day is still too long !!

But let's look at the history of April Fish :

The Fools' day is celebrated all over the world , both adults and children enjoy playing pranks . However it is believed that this habit started in France and even if some say it started with Pope Gregory XIII in 1582, most likely, the stage was set when King Charles IX of France in 1564 ordered a new calendar to replace the old Julian calendar. The new calendar was then named the Gregorian calendar, and changed the order of the months and moved New Year's Day to January 1. Before the change, the New Year was celebrated on March 25, and ended on April
Why a fish ? The name “April Fish” applied to the victim of the joke. The idea is that an April fish is a very young fish, and thus easily “caught”. It is thought that some French resisted the change and continued to celebrate the New Year on April 1st .Those who had already made the change ridiculed them, and sent them fake gifts or invitations to nonexistent parties. The butt of jokes around this time of year, they were called ''fools'' for celebrating New Year's on April 1 instead of January 1. Come to think of it, the entire situation seems very French indeed!

The French eventually adopted April 1 as a new celebration of these very events, and called it Poisson d'Avril meaning ''April Fish'', a term that is used to this day. So why the term ''April Fish''? Because the New Year once coincided with the sun leaving the zodiacal sign of Pisces, the time of year was significant to the New Year's celebration on the old Julian calendar.

In modern day France, Poisson d' Avril is celebrated by children, who often make paper fish and run around taping the fish to their friends' backs, making them a "fool". Once the ''victim'' realizes that he or she has been fooled, the prankster cries out ''Poisson d' Avril!''

Read more at Suite101: April Fish! http://www.suite101.com/article.cfm/americans_in_france/107651#ixzz0jpisLwHz

Quotation of the Day

A tyrant must put on the appearance of uncommon devotion to religion. Subjects are less apprehensive of illegal treatment from a ruler whom they consider god-fearing and pious. On the other hand, they do less easily move against him, believing that he has the gods on his side.

Aristotle (384 BC-322 BC)

I, Translator by David Bellos NYT

I found this article of the NYT quite interesting this is why I am sharing it on my blog / To read it in its original location , click : here

EVERYBODY has his own tale of terrible translation to tell — an incomprehensible restaurant menu in Croatia, a comically illiterate warning sign on a French beach. “Human-engineered” translation is just as inadequate in more important domains. In our courts and hospitals, in the military and security services, underpaid and overworked translators make muddles out of millions of vital interactions. Machine translation can certainly help in these cases. Its legendary bloopers are often no worse than the errors made by hard-pressed humans.

Machine translation has proved helpful in more urgent situations as well. When Haiti was devastated by an earthquake in January, aid teams poured in to the shattered island, speaking dozens of languages — but not Haitian Creole. How could a trapped survivor with a cellphone get usable information to rescuers? If he had to wait for a Chinese or Turkish or an English interpreter to turn up he might be dead before being understood. Carnegie Mellon University instantly released its Haitian Creole spoken and text data, and a network of volunteer developers produced a rough-and-ready machine translation system for Haitian Creole in little more than a long weekend. It didn’t produce prose of great beauty. But it worked.

The advantages and disadvantages of machine translation have been the subject of increasing debate among human translators lately because of the growing strides made in the last year by the newest major entrant in the field, Google Translate. But this debate actually began with the birth of machine translation itself.

The need for crude machine translation goes back to the start of the cold war. The United States decided it had to scan every scrap of Russian coming out of the Soviet Union, and there just weren’t enough translators to keep up (just as there aren’t enough now to translate all the languages that the United States wants to monitor). The cold war coincided with the invention of computers, and “cracking Russian” was one of the first tasks these machines were set.

The father of machine translation, Warren Weaver, chose to regard Russian as a “code” obscuring the real meaning of the text. His team and its successors here and in Europe proceeded in a commonsensical way: a natural language, they reckoned, is made of a lexicon (a set of words) and a grammar (a set of rules). If you could get the lexicons of two languages inside the machine (fairly easy) and also give it the whole set of rules by which humans construct meaningful combinations of words in the two languages (a more dubious proposition), then the machine would be able translate from one “code” into another.

Academic linguists of the era, Noam Chomsky chief among them, also viewed a language as a lexicon and a grammar, able to generate infinitely many different sentences out of a finite set of rules. But as the anti-Chomsky linguists at Oxford commented at the time, there are also infinitely many motor cars that can come out of a British auto plant, each one having something different wrong with it. Over the next four decades, machine translation achieved many useful results, but, like the British auto industry, it fell far short of the hopes of the 1950s.

Now we have a beast of a different kind. Google Translate is a statistical machine translation system, which means that it doesn’t try to unpick or understand anything. Instead of taking a sentence to pieces and then rebuilding it in the “target” tongue as the older machine translators do, Google Translate looks for similar sentences in already translated texts somewhere out there on the Web. Having found the most likely existing match through an incredibly clever and speedy statistical reckoning device, Google Translate coughs it up, raw or, if necessary, lightly cooked. That’s how it simulates — but only simulates — what we suppose goes on in a translator’s head.

Google Translate, which can so far handle 52 languages, sidesteps the linguists’ theoretical question of what language is and how it works in the human brain. In practice, languages are used to say the same things over and over again. For maybe 95 percent of all utterances, Google’s electronic magpie is a fabulous tool. But there are two important limitations that users of this or any other statistical machine translation system need to understand.

The target sentence supplied by Google Translate is not and must never be mistaken for the “correct translation.” That’s not just because no such thing as a “correct translation” really exists. It’s also because Google Translate gives only an expression consisting of the most probable equivalent phrases as computed by its analysis of an astronomically large set of paired sentences trawled from the Web.

The data comes in large part from the documentation of international organizations. Thousands of human translators working for the United Nations and the European Union and so forth have spent millions of hours producing precisely those pairings that Google Translate is now able to cherry-pick. The human translations have to come first for Google Translate to have anything to work with.

The variable quality of Google Translate in the different language pairings available is due in large part to the disparity in the quantities of human-engineered translations between those languages on the Web.

But what of real writing? Google Translate can work apparent miracles because it has access to the world library of Google Books. That’s presumably why, when asked to translate a famous phrase about love from “Les Misérables” — “On n’a pas d’autre perle à trouver dans les plis ténébreux de la vie” — Google Translate comes up with a very creditable “There is no other pearl to be found in the dark folds of life,” which just happens to be identical to one of the many published translations of that great novel. It’s an impressive trick for a computer, but for a human? All you need to do is get the old paperback from your basement.

And the program is very patchy. The opening sentence of Proust’s “In Search of Lost Time” comes out as an ungrammatical “Long time I went to bed early,” and the results for most other modern classics are just as unusable.

Can Google Translate ever be of any use for the creation of new literary translations into English or another language? The first thing to say is that there really is no need for it to do that: would-be translators of foreign literature are not in short supply — they are screaming for more opportunities to publish their work.

But even if the need were there, Google Translate could not do anything useful in this domain. It is not conceived or programmed to take into account the purpose, real-world context or style of any utterance. (Any system able to do that would be a truly epochal achievement, but such a miracle is not on the agenda of even the most advanced machine translation developers.)

However, to play devil’s advocate for a moment, if you were to take a decidedly jaundiced view of some genre of contemporary foreign fiction (say, French novels of adultery and inheritance), you could surmise that since such works have nothing new to say and employ only repeated formulas, then after a sufficient number of translated novels of that kind and their originals had been scanned and put up on the Web, Google Translate should be able to do a pretty good simulation of translating other regurgitations of the same ilk.

So what? That’s not what literary translation is about. For works that are truly original — and therefore worth translating — statistical machine translation hasn’t got a hope. Google Translate can provide stupendous services in many domains, but it is not set up to interpret or make readable work that is not routine — and it is unfair to ask it to try. After all, when it comes to the real challenges of literary translation, human beings have a hard time of it, too.

By David Bellos

David Bellos is the director of the Program in Translation and Intercultural Communication at Princeton.