Rocksmith (fully: Rocksmith 2014 Remastered) is a video game. Someone saw how popular the Guitar Hero video games were and decided to make a similar game that used a real guitar and make it into a tool to teach guitar.
For a very long time now, any time someone asked me what my hobbies were, I would say “translation.” That means I translate all day at my full-time in-house job, then come home and do freelance work, and occasionally – up until last summer – try my hand at translating a chapter from a book or a poem for fun. As you might imagine, it left a fairly one-track life. I read and watch movies, but other than spending as much time with my kids and my wife as I can manage, my life is all translation.
Then comes 2020. I look at the acoustic guitar hanging on my wall, and the electric guitar in the corner and remember the video game I tried out some ten years ago, but didn’t stick to. I also tried to learn guitar once before, back in about 1993 for about 3-4 months. I decided I’d take another try, more serious this time. This was partly inspired by my daughter asking for a ukulele for Christmas and us attaching lessons to it – and I took her to the lessons and she wanted me to stay in the room with her and the teacher. I remembered the times I tried guitar, and my years playing violin from elementary to high school and decided to try the guitar again.
I still stink, of course, I’m playing a game 4-5 times a week, mostly focused on the lessons and technique stuff to build fundamental skills. And that brings me to the point.
When I play Rocksmith, there are some exercises built into the “Learn a Song” section – scales, finger strength, speed, and so on. When you play these, the song keeps going whether you get it right or not. It gives you grade at the end, but no matter what you do, unless you give up and smack the escape key on the keyboard, the song and the prompts keep coming. (I tried to take a video of this, but the sound didn’t work, maybe I’ll update this article in a day or two if I manage it.)
As a translator, I have a terrible habit of getting stuck. I’ll cruise along in whatever I’m translating, but as soon as I hit a word or phrase that I don’t know, or that seems out of place, I’ll stop. I’ll research. I’ll send emails and text messages, then I’ll go down the Google rabbit hole – and eventually to YouTube or I’ll pick up a book, cook dinner, help a daughter with homework… and next thing I know it’s been an hour or a day or (to my shame) a week.
The thing I’m learning from Rocksmith – apart from how to play the guitar – is that I have to keep going. I’ve heard the advice, and I’ve even tried it several times, of highlighting the problem phrase/sentence and moving on, leaving the research for the first edit pass. Now I’m starting to implement that plan more often than distracting myself after a brief search.
That’ll do, then. Whether you like Nike (Just Do It.) or Dori (just keep swimming), the music goes on and you have to keep playing – it won’t wait for you to catch up.
I’ve noted before that the Kindle Voyage appears to be getting close to a good display of Arabic; you have to side load the Arabic documents somehow – I usually use email to my Kindle address. I recently had a set of web articles (book reviews) that I wanted to read, but I prefer to read on the paperwhite screen. Someday I’ll have enough ‘free money’ laying around that I’ll be able to buy an 
At first glance, you probably thought the same thing I did: That looks pretty good! Let me pile on a couple of other “pretty good” things before I start on what makes it painful to really use. If you long-press a word, it highlights it and, if you are connected to wifi, looks for a Wikipedia article. You can also tap the “translation” tab and get an actual lookup (though the dictionary doesn’t work – that is dependent on an actual dictionary being installed, not supported for Arabic yet). You can see here that the translation (for the Arabic word سلطة), for some reason, shows up on top of the text that says “Translating your selection.” If you swipe back to Wiki or the dictionary and then back to translation, the ghost text disappears. They use 
The first one is the text alignment. Those of you who don’t read Arabic probably don’t care about this post anyway, but if you are reading, I’ll do my best to include you. Arabic is a right-to-left language. That means the text starts on the right hand side of the page and words progress to the left, with most letters connected sort of like cursive handwriting in English (but with some very interesting rules). If you look at this “big picture” carefully, you’ll notice that the text is nice and even down the left hand side of the page, and a bit random down the right hand side. Not that unusual for English documents, but for Arabic, it should be the other way around – or at least make it fully justified and square down both sides. This hints that the Kindle isn’t fully bi-di (bidirectional text) aware. However, when I went to a location with an English word integrated into the text, it was in the right place and did not break up the word order. So the problem likely lies with alignment rather than text direction or flow, and ought to be a relatively easy fix. Of course, I don’t know what the code behind the Kindle display looks like – and I’m not a developer – so it could be enormously complex and I’m an idiot. I’ll accept that.
The font is dynamic, like all fonts on the Kindle. Certain sizes seem to have some spacing issues. I usually have mine set at a 7, and I found this. The m م (indicating the Gregorian year) should not be under the 2, and the close parenthesis should not be over the 2 either. Both problems go away if I bump up to 8 or down to 6.
Another thing that I’ve noticed is that the diacritical marks – which aren’t often used – turn hideous when they are. Take a look at this tanween – two kasras (for the -in sound) on موازٍ here. It looks more like someone has crossed out the z.
In this next example, you can take a look at how the final ت is connected to the ط. There is a little loopy shape between the ط and the ت … oh, wait! I just checked the original Word document for this, and it turns out the phrase is فور أن تنطق, and that last letter is not a ت but a ق. Interesting; the ن goes below the line of script a little, why not a ق? That dip below the line is one of the distinguishing characteristics of that letter.
And I guess this answers my next question which was: what letter is connected to the T ت here? None, it is meant to be a ق, and the circle that is crowding it out from the right is an m م, but this is almost impossible to tell because there is essentially no space between the two letters. Before doing all of this digging, and looking back at the document on my PC, I thought the word was ترهت. According to the Word document, this phrase is أن ترمق العالم من علٍ This phrase also gives me the chance to talk about the ayn ع and ghayn غ – in most fonts (including the one you are likely using) a medial ayn/ghayn has a flattish top to distinguish it from the more round fa/qaf ف/ق shapes: ـعـغـ vs. ـفـقـ. In this font – the third word from the left is العالم and the ayn is round and solid and a bit smaller than the fa shape. In this case, I was able to tell what the letter was meant to be, I just don’t care for its design.
If someone were to ask me, and no one has, I would recommend using an OpenSource font, something available under the GPL that is both traditional and easy to read. This provides for easy scaling and no problems with licensing. One very nice option might be 
I also like the free 
My name is Bustan.
Tarjema Translations 
