Buck Passing－一個中英口譯員的華麗大冒險

Mispelling Misspelling
Misspellings may be due to either typing errors or lack of knowledge of the correct spelling. Sadly both kinds can be found thoughout my posts. (It's also partially due to my hunt-and-peck tying which prevents me from being able to see what has been typed without glancing away from the keys. )

Passing the 'buck' and 'puck'?

After Xin pointed out a mistyped word in my most recent entry 短逐步馬拉松, I read over the entire article again and found at least 4 other spelling mistakes!

I was going to complain to Pixnet about not having an online spell-checker so you get a red line under a typo or a misspelled word. But later I realized that my misspelling is more often a correct spelling of another word (it's vs. its) instead of a series of letters that represents no correctly spelled word (printer vs. printre).

And that's the kind of misspelling that computerized spell-checker can't help you with!

Extensive misspellings throughout my posts may actually cost me a visitor or two every now and then because some folks do get caught up on these. So I really appreciate it when visitors to my blog point out misspellings in my writing so I can correct them asap. (This is especially important for my ESL students who read this blog.)

Most Misspelled Words

As a reminder to myself, I came up with a list of most misspelled words when I blog in English:

* off- of
* you're- your
* too- to- two
* an- a- and
* its- it's
* them- then- than
* there- their- they're

... this is just the tip of the iceberg- a gianourmous iceberg!

Old Habits Die Hard
It dawned on me that my frequent misspelling may have a lot to do with the way I learned English as a second language. When I was a kid, I went to international school where I learned survival English by listening to and imitating my peers. So I ended up with a large "auditory vocabulary" of which the spelling I didn't necessarily know.

I suspect this is why even till today, I still look at spelling as an act of approximating and transcribing the sounds of the language into alphabetic letters. But in reality completely phonetic spellings are rare due to drifts in pronunciations or irregular spellings adopted over time.

And this has taken its toll on me since I became a Chinese-English translator/interpreter, a profession that requires a large vocabulary and decent spelling ability. So recently I've vowed to spend more time checking my spelling before sending e-mails or posting new articles online. And I've checked the spelling of this post twice!.

what a cute play on words