Free articles are my bread and butter. I am always looking for knowledge on various subjects – Science articles, health articles, newspaper articles and much more. Ironically, I have decided to share the tips I have gathered over the time on finding the best free articles by writing a free article. Enjoy it.
Here are some tips that will help you locate the most suitable articles for you:
1. Stay focused – Looking for free articles on the web is addictive. You could easily find yourself sitting for hours staring at the computer screen with no real outcome. Remind yourself constantly what you are looking for and ask yourself if you are currently in the way to achieving it. 2. Read the articles’ abstract or summary to eliminate irrelevant articles.
3. Informational not commercial – If you are reading a page with too many pictures, adds or reviews, you are in the wrong place. Look for more objective data on informational pages.
4. Look In the right places – I suggest you consider looking for free articles using one of two methods.
The first, Look for the free article in google or in your favorite search engine by writing in the “Search” field: “The articles’ subject” + “article”. This way you will get textual content and not spam commercial sites.
The second, Look for the articles’ subject in article directories like ezinearticles.
5. Read the comments – You are not first who have read the article. You could save time by reading the articles’ comments before reading all the articles. If all the readers wrote negative comments, do not bother reading the free article. In some article directories you could even see the average grade given by the readers. 6. Time is money – If you are looking for a quality article and nowPsychology Articles, my best advice would be: pay for it. A couple of dollars sure worth the hours of looking for the needle in a haystack.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Find more about articles and web content on Web content providers.http://www.tigilet.com – Web content experts.Free articles, web content
Friday, May 4, 2007
Don’t Let Your Kanji Tattoo Get “Lost In Translation”
Thinking of getting a kanji tattoo or kanji jewelry? Then arm yourself with this information before you buy anything. It may be the difference between being cool and national humiliation.
What? National humiliation? Well OK, national humiliation is an unlikely outcome, but an article in the March 1st, 2005 Washington Post Express shows that the possibility is there. "Lost in Translation" looked at the real dangers facing the unwary consumers who get kanji tattoos.
I am not joking when I say “real dangers”. But neither am I referring to unhygenic tattooing practices. What I am talking about is toe-curlingly appalling linguistic blunders. Specifically, I mean kanji combinations like these:
- Extremely Military Affairs Stopping
- Crazy Diarrhea
- Weird (tattooed on one B. Spears)
Yes, these are phrases that real people (yes, Britney Spears is a real person) actually have had tattooed into their skin.
To be honest, I am not entirely surprised at these and other errors. After all, I have seen many reversed images of kanji being offered for tattoos, and kanji jewelry that simply did not mean anything like it was supposed to.
One necklace, I remember, had the kanji for “road” on it - although the poor owner had been told it meant love. I guess her love hit the road and didn't come back no more, no more, no more, no more....
As Tian Tang puts it in the Post:
"People ask, 'I got the tattoo, can you tell me what this means? And I'm like, 'Why didn't you do this before you got that tattoo?'"
Yes, you would think that would be the obvious thing to do – especially if you are getting something permanent like a kanji tattoo. So how can you make sure you don’t end up a national laughingstock?
First of all, make sure you know something about the Japanese language. Check out the copious information at sites like japanese.about.com and in five minutes you will know more about kanji, hiragana and katakana than most of the people already walking around with it tattooed into their skin.
Next, remember that there is often no such thing as an exact translation. Basic nouns are one thing – a table is a table is a table, after all. But abstract concepts, like Semper Fidelis (the motto of the US Marine Corps), can be notoriously difficult to translate well.
Once you have grasped this background material, you are ready to meet with the tattoo artist. That’s right – meet. Don’t get anything done yet. At first you just want to talk. Specifically, you want to find out how familiar he or she is with the issues mentioned above. If after an hour or so on the internet you know more about Japanese than your tattoo artist, then you need to be very careful about kanji she suggests.
So what can you do if your tattoo artist doesn’t know his kanji from his katakana? How do you go about getting the kanji yourself?
Well if you are confident in your new-found kanji knowledge, then there are a number of online dictionaries such as this one http://kanjidict.stc.cx/dict that can help.
Otherwise I would recommend getting a translation from a site like the one I run - http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/ . A good translator will be able to offer you a number of different options as well as explaining the exact meaning and pronunciation of the different kanji. They should also be able to offer you a number of different styles, from basic kanji calligraphy fonts to genuine Japanese shodo calligraphy.
At the end of the dayPsychology Articles, how you decide to go about getting your kanji tattoo is up to you. Just remember that preparation is the key to making sure your kanji tattoo doesn’t get “Lost in Translation”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Munday lives in Japan and is the creator of www.japanese-name-translation.com, where you can download images of over 2,200 names in kanji or have a unique phrase translated into Japanese for a tattoo. This article is © Stephen Munday 2005. Permission is given to reproduce this article as a whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.
What? National humiliation? Well OK, national humiliation is an unlikely outcome, but an article in the March 1st, 2005 Washington Post Express shows that the possibility is there. "Lost in Translation" looked at the real dangers facing the unwary consumers who get kanji tattoos.
I am not joking when I say “real dangers”. But neither am I referring to unhygenic tattooing practices. What I am talking about is toe-curlingly appalling linguistic blunders. Specifically, I mean kanji combinations like these:
- Extremely Military Affairs Stopping
- Crazy Diarrhea
- Weird (tattooed on one B. Spears)
Yes, these are phrases that real people (yes, Britney Spears is a real person) actually have had tattooed into their skin.
To be honest, I am not entirely surprised at these and other errors. After all, I have seen many reversed images of kanji being offered for tattoos, and kanji jewelry that simply did not mean anything like it was supposed to.
One necklace, I remember, had the kanji for “road” on it - although the poor owner had been told it meant love. I guess her love hit the road and didn't come back no more, no more, no more, no more....
As Tian Tang puts it in the Post:
"People ask, 'I got the tattoo, can you tell me what this means? And I'm like, 'Why didn't you do this before you got that tattoo?'"
Yes, you would think that would be the obvious thing to do – especially if you are getting something permanent like a kanji tattoo. So how can you make sure you don’t end up a national laughingstock?
First of all, make sure you know something about the Japanese language. Check out the copious information at sites like japanese.about.com and in five minutes you will know more about kanji, hiragana and katakana than most of the people already walking around with it tattooed into their skin.
Next, remember that there is often no such thing as an exact translation. Basic nouns are one thing – a table is a table is a table, after all. But abstract concepts, like Semper Fidelis (the motto of the US Marine Corps), can be notoriously difficult to translate well.
Once you have grasped this background material, you are ready to meet with the tattoo artist. That’s right – meet. Don’t get anything done yet. At first you just want to talk. Specifically, you want to find out how familiar he or she is with the issues mentioned above. If after an hour or so on the internet you know more about Japanese than your tattoo artist, then you need to be very careful about kanji she suggests.
So what can you do if your tattoo artist doesn’t know his kanji from his katakana? How do you go about getting the kanji yourself?
Well if you are confident in your new-found kanji knowledge, then there are a number of online dictionaries such as this one http://kanjidict.stc.cx/dict that can help.
Otherwise I would recommend getting a translation from a site like the one I run - http://www.japanese-name-translation.com/ . A good translator will be able to offer you a number of different options as well as explaining the exact meaning and pronunciation of the different kanji. They should also be able to offer you a number of different styles, from basic kanji calligraphy fonts to genuine Japanese shodo calligraphy.
At the end of the dayPsychology Articles, how you decide to go about getting your kanji tattoo is up to you. Just remember that preparation is the key to making sure your kanji tattoo doesn’t get “Lost in Translation”.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Stephen Munday lives in Japan and is the creator of www.japanese-name-translation.com, where you can download images of over 2,200 names in kanji or have a unique phrase translated into Japanese for a tattoo. This article is © Stephen Munday 2005. Permission is given to reproduce this article as a whole with the URLs correctly hyperlinked.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)