From Professional Linguist and Senior Executive to Texas Czech Preservationist: Continuing My Great-Grandfather’s 140-Year Mission

This is the first in a series of posts I’ll be writing on the Texas Czech Legacy Project

Introduction: The Unexpected Journey

If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d be spending my time listening to transcripts of interviews with elderly Texas Czechs, I probably would have laughed and said, “Yeah I WISH.” After more than two decades as a professional linguist and technical expert, my language career has been defined by academic experience, government service, and the latest advances in all types of language tools. Yet here I am, volunteering my time to help preserve a unique Czech dialect in Texas—and I can honestly say it’s the most meaningful and fun work I’ve ever done.

This journey has taken me from the world of academic research and professional translation into the heart of a grassroots cultural preservation effort. I have reconnected with a powerful family legacy that stretches back 140 years, connecting my own career to the remarkable story of my great-grandfather, Jan Štěpán. His dedication to immigrant communities in America laid the foundation for the work I’m doing today, and I’m honored to continue his mission in a new era.

My Professional Background: From Academia to Language Technology

Let me start with a bit of context. I earned my Ph.D. in Slavic Linguistics from UNC Chapel Hill, where my dissertation focused on politeness strategies in Russian, Polish, and Czech. Over the past 20+ years, I’ve worked as a translator, transcriber, language instructor, and technical leader; a lot of my professional life with the government (and since I retired!) has  revolved around analysis and language technology—everything from computer-assisted translation (CAT) tools to advanced AI-driven linguistic analysis.

I’ve specialized in Russian ↔ English and Czech ↔ English translation, and I’ve consulted on cross-cultural communication projects for businesses and academic institutions. My work has always been about bridging gaps—between languages, cultures, and people. And in a way, that makes sense, given how deeply my own family history was intertwined with this mission.

Discovering the Texas Czech Legacy Project

My connection to Czech heritage runs deep. My ancestors were Iowa Czechs—Bohemians who settled in the Midwest in the late 1800s. While researching my family history, I stumbled upon the Texas Czech Legacy Project (TCLP), an academic initiative led by Dr. Lida Cope and housed at UT Austin. The project’s goal is ambitious: to document and preserve the unique Czech dialect spoken by descendants of 19th-century immigrants in Texas.

When I joined the project, an international team (including collaborators from Charles University in Prague) had already transcribed about 50 hours of oral history recordings. But there are still more than 450 hours left—an enormous task. Traditional transcription methods would have taken decades, and time is running out for the few native speakers who remain among us. That’s when I realized my background in language technology could make a real difference.

The Family Legacy Connection: Jan Štěpán’s Story

Here’s where things get personal. My great-grandfather, Jan Štěpán, emigrated from a tiny village near Prague, in Bohemia, in 1889 at the age of 20. Already a trained teacher, he dedicated 59 years to serving immigrant communities in America. In Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he taught at the first exclusively Czech school in the United States, founded in 1901. Over his career, he taught citizenship classes to more than 3,000 immigrants, speaking eight languages fluently to help anyone who needed it.

Jan’s teaching methods were so effective that a Columbia University professor once called them “the best in the United States.” He was also the editor of Cedar Rapidské Listy, a Czech newspaper, and contributed to Svornost, the first Czech daily in America. Jan and his wife (my great-grandmother Kateřina neé Šnydrová) raised their children, all born in the US, as bilingual in Czech and English. Meaning: my grandfather spoke Czech like a native. Unfortunately, he did not pass the language on to my father. However, he did himself have a lot of Czech language materials (dictionaries, grammars, books and magazines). Those materials sat in our family for decades—until my grandfather died, and I inherited them around age 8. They were the spark that ignited my own passion for Slavic linguistics.

There’s a direct line from Jan’s service in the late 1800s, through the materials he and my grandfather left behind, to my academic career and government work and now to this Texas project in 2025. It’s a legacy of service, innovation, and dedication to community that I’m proud to continue.

The Technical Challenge

One of the most exciting (and challenging) aspects of the Texas Czech Legacy Project is the language itself.

What is Texas Czech, you ask?  In short:

According to the TCLP website, Texas Czech, an immigrant variety of European Czech, is a product of over a century and a half of contact between Moravian Czech and English in Texas. Texas Czech blends the archaic features of Northeastern Moravian dialects – the Lachian (Lašsko) and Valachian (Valašsko) regions of the present-day Czech Republic, aspects of Standard (Written) Czech, and features of English spoken in Texas.

And it’s worth a couple of quick notes on the Czech language in general.

  1. The Foreign Service Institute categorizes it as a Category IV language, meaning it takes approximately 1,100 hours to reach conversational fluency.  It is considered a very difficult language to learn, even in its standard form.
  • Czech has complex distinctions between spoken, written, and formal registers. Czech is often considered an example of diglossia:
  • High code: Literary Czech, the formal, standard language used in official, written, and public domains.
  • Low code: Common Czech, the informal, colloquial language used in everyday, private speech. 

In short, when I, as a non-native speaker, started learning Czech, I learned the “high code,” standard Czech. When I went to Czech Republic for the first time and spoke to Czechs in real life, I was often told how beautifully I spoke, but in return I couldn’t understand a word being said to me! (And that was when they were speaking the standard Prague form- Spoken Prague Czech!) Imagine if in English our “High Code” was Shakespearean English, and the “Low Code” that everybody speaks is how we speak today.  You learn “the lady doth protest too much, methinks” but people actually say “The harder you deny it, the less I believe you;” “Hark! Who goes there” is “Hey, who’s that?” You get the idea.

So Texas Czech is a dialect of a Moravian dialect (which is REALLY different from how they speak in Prague), with standard Czech features and Texas English in the mix as well. It’s hard for educated native speakers of Czech to make sense of. It’s also hard for non-native speakers to make sense of (as dialects often are).

In short, challenges abound. The language is extremely difficult. There are few native speakers left these days. Thankfully, we have access to hundreds of hours of recordings- but manual transcription is an extremely labor- and time- intensive activity even under the very best of circumstances (standard language usage; clear recording with no static or background noise; clear, slow speech, and so on).

How in the world, then, can we expose more of this linguistic and cultural material to the world, as soon as possible?

Technology.

This is where my background in both language technology and linguistics comes into play.

Maybe we could sprinkle some AI on this project… to scale the effort – but we need to do it in a way that is respectful of speakers of Texas Czech and their culture. The end goal is to make the invaluable knowledge and experiences (and language features!) hidden in the recordings available in a meaningful way to anyone who is interested: friends, relatives, historians, linguists, genealogists…

This is a teaser. More to come soon on this, in a future post dedicated to this unique language preservation issue and how to use technology to make the most out of limited resources.

Why This Matters: Heritage, Community, and the Future

Why does this work matter? Because these stories are our stories—the stories of Czech families who came to America, built new lives, and preserved their language and culture against the odds. Language preservation isn’t just about words; it’s about identity, memory, and belonging. Technology can help, but it takes community support and human expertise to make it meaningful.

The Broader Implications: A Model for Heritage Language Preservation

The Texas Czech Legacy Project is more than just a local initiative. It’s a model for heritage language preservation across American immigrant communities. AI technology has enormous potential for cultural preservation, but it must be paired with academic rigor and community involvement. Our work could be replicated for other heritage dialects, creating archives and corpora that support both linguistic research and cultural continuity.

Call to Action: How You Can Help

If you’re reading this and feel inspired, there are several ways you can help:

  • Share this story within your academic, professional, or Czech-American networks. We are also on LinkedIn!
  • Connect us with potential funders who value scholarly cultural preservation.
  • Collaborate with other heritage language / language preservation projects.
  • If you have a family story or connection to Czech heritage, reach out—I’d love to hear from you.

Conclusion: Honoring the Past, Serving the Future

As I reflect on this 140-year family tradition of service, I’m struck by the parallels between Jan’s tools and methods and the modern technology I use today. The mission is the same: to serve, to preserve, and to connect. Continuing Jan’s legacy through innovation and community engagement is the most fulfilling chapter of my career so far. Together, we can ensure that the voices of Texas-Czech families—and the heritage they represent—are preserved for generations to come.

Watch this space: In my next post, I will be discussing the team behind the Texas Czech Legacy project; what’s been done to date, how, and by whom; its goals and opportunities to engage and support.  In future posts, you can expect more on language technology; the actual “experiments” we undertook to see what would work; how technology might help other language and cultural preservation efforts, and even more! Stay tuned!

What Translation Actually Is (And Why It Still Requires Human Expertise)

What is translation, really? And why does it still require human expertise in the age of AI?

The short answer: Translation is the professional practice of preserving meaning, intent, and cultural context across languages. It requires linguistic ability, cultural fluency, and strategic judgment about what matters in a given context.

The longer answer – and the one that explains why I am so excited to continue my “word work” after two decades in the Intelligence Community- is more interesting.

The Foundation: Beyond Word-for-Word

In intelligence work, you learn quickly that translation isn’t about finding equivalent words. It’s about understanding intention, recognizing subtext, and knowing what’s at stake when meaning shifts even slightly. A mistranslated phrase in a diplomatic cable isn’t just inaccurate, it can misrepresent intent, escalate tensions, or obscure critical information.

That IC background taught me something essential: context determines meaning, and missing subtext can mean missing everything.

When people ask what makes a good translation, they often expect a technical answer: accuracy, grammar, maybe vocabulary. Those things matter, but they’re just the foundation. The real work of translation lies in nuance—in what’s implied, softened, or rearranged to sound natural, credible, and true.

Accuracy gets you to correct. Nuance gets you to right.

What Linguistic Expertise Actually Looks Like

Let me show you what I mean with a few simple examples that trip up even sophisticated machine translation.

Take the Czech words stavebník and stavitel. Both can translate to “builder” in English. These words were recently used interchangeably (in Czech) in a Machine Translation Post-Editing job I was working on. Except a stavebník is the developer—the person commissioning / paying for the construction—while a stavitel is the contractor doing the physical building. That distinction determines liability, responsibility, and contractual obligations.

My guess is the Machine Translation was rendering original English content (where the meaning of the word ‘builder’ could be understood through context) into Czech and was using the words stavitel / stavebník interchangeably, ?? for variety ??  In Czech, the two words have different meanings. A professionally nuanced translation preserves the relationship between them because it understands what’s at stake.

Or consider the word pomalu. In standard written Czech it means “slowly.” But in the sentence Už bude pomalu jaro, (common in spoken Czech), it doesn’t describe pace—it expresses anticipation. The natural translation isn’t “Spring is slowly coming” but “It’s almost spring now.” The literal translation is technically correct but misses the speaker’s actual meaning entirely.

One more from some post-editing I was doing: The question (in English) had been something like “Is this a redwood or a sequoia?”  And it had been machine-translated to Je to sekvoj nebo sekvoj? Even if you don’t understand a word of Czech, you can probably sound out that sekvoj sounds like “sequoia” and realize that it essentially asked, “Is this a sequoia or a sequoia?” Ummm, yes? The fact is, if you type that English question into Google Translate, you get the sekvoj or sekvoj version in Czech. Do more precise words for these trees exist in Czech? Of course. But in this case a human had to recognize they were needed: “Redwood” = sekvoj (vždyzelená); “Sequoia (giant)” = sekvojovec (obrovský).

These aren’t edge cases. They’re the everyday texture of cross-language communication.

Cultural Context and Register

Nuance isn’t just linguistic—it’s social and cultural.

Czech has formal and informal pronouns (Vy vs. ty, similar to French vous/tu), but the distinction goes beyond grammar. It signals relationships, respect, and professional boundaries. (If you’re REALLY interested, please read my 400+ page dissertation on this subject here).

A research question occurs to me: Given, say, a translation of a short story or a novel-  from English into Czech (or Russian, or French, or German, or Polish) – how does the Machine Translation or Generative AI / LLM fare expressing relationships through pronouns and their related structures (corresponding verbs, etc.)? How can it know whether the translation of ‘you’ should be Ty or Vy? (or Ty or Pan/Pani in Polish, etc.)?

I’m going to hypothesize right now that a computer-generated translation will not be able to consistently get this right. From English to Czech for example it will probably get it right for true singular / plural, but not for the polite form; going Czech to English it all gets flattened to ‘you’ but that’s the problem- English might need more words to express the actual relationship conveyed by the pronouns. Which the computer will not know to generate. More to come on this.

Why This Matters: The Stakes of Getting It Wrong

In the Intelligence Community, I learned that translation failures aren’t just embarrassing—they have consequences.

A phrase that seems neutral might carry cultural or political weight. A shift in formality might signal changing relationships or priorities. The difference between “we are building” and “we will build” can indicate commitment level, timeline confidence, or negotiating position. When you’re working with communications for intelligence reporting, missing that nuance doesn’t just produce awkward phrasing; it produces misunderstanding. In national security, that can even cost lives.

The same principle applies across other high-stakes contexts:

Legal and contractual documents: A misread nuance can shift obligations, change liability, or create ambiguity where precision is required.

Marketing and brand communications: Tone mismatch undermines credibility. A campaign that works in English might feel presumptuous, cold, or culturally tone-deaf in Czech or Russian if the register isn’t adapted.

Academic and research writing: Precision affects reputation. A poorly translated methodology section can make rigorous research appear sloppy.

Business communications: Relationship-building depends on appropriate formality, warmth, and cultural awareness. Getting the register wrong can damage trust before the conversation even begins.

This is why translation is a professional discipline, not just a language skill.

Human + Machine Teaming; or What AI Does Well, and When Humans Are Essential

AI translation has improved dramatically, and it has a place in modern language workflows. For instance, for straightforward technical documentation, machine translation can be remarkably effective.

But here’s what AI still can’t do: it can’t tell you whether that Czech speaker meant “almost spring” or “slowly spring” when they said už bude pomalu jaro. It can’t distinguish whether your audience expects formal distance or collegial warmth. And it can’t flag the moment when literal accuracy produces cultural awkwardness or changes meaning in ways that matter. These aren’t failures of technology. They’re the limits of pattern matching without contextual judgment.

I’m not arguing against AI—I’m arguing for strategic use of it.

Human expertise is essential when:

Tone and relationship matter. Formal vs. informal, authoritative vs. collaborative—these aren’t just vocabulary choices; they’re relational signals.

Cultural context shapes meaning. Idioms, metaphors, humor, and directness vary dramatically. AI can identify idioms but rarely knows how to adapt them. More on the art of “transcreation” soon.

Ambiguity requires resolution. When a sentence could mean two things, AI picks the most common interpretation. A human translator asks what makes sense given the speaker, audience, and purpose.

The stakes are high. Contracts, medical documents, brand positioning: these aren’t places for approximation.

The key is knowing which tool fits which task. And that discernment? That’s also a kind of translation expertise.

For many clients, an acceptable approach combines both human and machine: AI handles first-pass translation of straightforward content, and human review ensures accuracy, tone, and cultural fit. Human-only translation is reserved for anything involving nuance, relationships, legal weight, or brand voice. But don’t be fooled: often that “human review” of an AI translation takes as much time, energy, and research as a from-scratch “human only” translation does.

How I Approach Professional Translation

At AC Stepan WordWorks, I treat every project as a judgment call: What does this text need to accomplish? Who’s the audience? What’s at stake if the tone is off or the nuance is lost?

Translation isn’t about converting words; it’s about preserving intent, building trust, and ensuring that what you meant to say is what they actually hear (read).

That means:

Reading for subtext and assumption. Every sentence carries assumptions about who’s speaking and to whom.

Considering cultural rhythm. Some languages prefer directness; others value indirection. Some expect formality; others prioritize warmth.

Asking what could go wrong. Where could ambiguity create problems? Where might tone undermine credibility?

Knowing when to push back. Sometimes the best translation advice is “this won’t work in the target language—here’s why, and here’s what would.”

Machine translation and LLMs can be tools in the process. Human expertise is what ensures the result works—not just linguistically, but strategically, culturally, and contextually.

Translation as Empathy

Good translation is like good architecture: the structure must be sound, but the light must fall right, too.

After decades of working across languages, cultures, and contexts—in academia, in intelligence, now in professional language consulting—I’ve come to see translation as a kind of empathy. It’s not about finding matching words. It’s about finding matching minds.

It’s about understanding not just what someone said, but what they meant. Not just the message, but the relationship it’s trying to build. Not just the content, but the context that makes it matter.

If you’ve ever stumbled across a phrase that almost worked but didn’t quite, you’ve already felt the gap that nuance fills. That’s where the translator lives—in the space between languages, finding the version that doesn’t just say the same thing, but does the same work.


Translation accuracy isn’t just about words—it’s about meaning, culture, and trust. At AC Stepan WordWorks, I help clients bridge the gap between human nuance and efficiency through careful review, editing, and linguistic consulting.

Explore more insights and case studies on my WordWorks Blog or reach out for a consultation on how to evaluate and elevate your multilingual content.

Anne Cofield Stepan
Founder & Principal Language Consultant
AC Stepan WordWorks

Why I Volunteer with Translators without Borders (And Why You Should Too!)

So there I was, doing my own thing browsing around the internet, when BOOM 💥 — an email lands in my inbox: “Ready to Make a Difference? Czech translators needed for WHO project.”

Wait, what? I had completely forgotten I’d signed up to volunteer with Translators without Borders a couple months earlier. And now the World Health Organization (WHO) needed me?

I raced to the website, terrified all the texts would already be claimed by translators faster on the draw than me. (They weren’t. Whew. 😅)

Post-Retirement Goals: Use My Powers for Good

One of the things I’m really enjoying about retirement is discovering all the ways I can use my language skills to give back to a world in desperate need of support. After decades of government service, I wanted to find meaningful ways to continue using English, Czech, and Russian — for causes that matter on a human level.

That’s how I found Translators without Borders.

TWB is a nonprofit that provides language services — translation, interpretation, subtitling, plain-language editing — to humanitarian groups and communities in crisis. Their mission is beautifully simple: ensure that people everywhere can access the information they need, in a language and format they understand.

Think about that for a second. Imagine you’re fleeing conflict with your family. You arrive exhausted at a refugee camp. Aid workers hand you a pamphlet about accessing medical care, or protecting your children from disease, or registering for assistance.

But it’s in a language you can’t read.

What do you do? Who do you trust? How do you keep your family safe?

In emergencies, clear communication literally saves lives. Language inclusion isn’t just nice to have — it’s about dignity, trust, and survival. When aid reaches people in their native language, it works. People can act on the information. They can protect themselves. They can make informed decisions.

And here’s the thing: TWB’s global network of professional and volunteer linguists makes it possible to reach millions of people across hundreds of languages — many of them completely overlooked by the commercial translation industry. Languages that don’t have “market value” but have human value beyond measure.

My First Assignment: Website Localization for WHO

The project: translate elements of a WHO learning platform from English into Czech. The entire project had been divided into chunks of 1000-1500 words each, for selection by volunteer translators.

Despite my natural inclination to do ALL THE THINGS, I showed admirable restraint and signed up for just one translation task out of the ~15 available. Let’s see how this goes first, I told myself. I can always do more later. (Look at me! Moderation! ⭐)

First panic: THIS IS FOR WHO. WHAT IF THIS IS DETAILED MEDICAL INFORMATION I DON’T UNDERSTAND. 😱

I clicked to preview the content, heart racing slightly.

Turns out? They mostly needed standard website operations language rendered into Czech: “Your passwords don’t match,” “Reset your password,” “Click on the link in the email we just sent you.”

OK I GOT THIS!

Is it art? No. Is it good localization practice? You bet.

The Technical Side (Or: My Ongoing Relationship with Panic and Doubt)

TWB provides a Translation Memory tool called Phrase (formerly Memsource), and all translation work happens in that platform.

Next panic: OH NO WHAT IF I CAN’T FIGURE OUT PHRASE. 😰

Spoiler alert: it was fine. It’s very similar to other TM tools I’ve worked with (MemoQ, CafeTran Espresso). Some features were turned off but it was easy to use and effective.

Which brought me to my NEXT panic (note recurring theme): What if the way I’m translating things that COULD be stated multiple ways (imperative vs. infinitive, formal vs. friendlier/more conversational) isn’t consistent with how the translators of the OTHER FOURTEEN SECTIONS are doing it? How would I know??

That’s a main reason for TMs — standardized language so different translators are on the same page for the totality of the project. Turns out what we actually had in Phrase were MACHINE TRANSLATIONS to start with, so this became more of a Machine Translation Post-Editing exercise. That’s a fine starting point for translating, but it doesn’t offer the standards or guidelines I was hoping for.

I started wondering: how do project managers efficiently reconcile all those variations when they compile the final 15 parts? That type of workflow wasn’t something I experienced in my government work. (75-page document? It’s all on you, start to finish.) How do you scale that kind of work efficiently? More research needed on this! 🤔

Fighting Perfection (Spoiler: Good Enough Won)

While I was busy overthinking everything, I was confident that nothing I translated was WRONG. I took extensive notes justifying word choices and documenting the changes I made. (Probably all unnecessary. Probably nobody but me cares.)

I wrote and asked for feedback. They assured me that if there were problems, I’d hear from them.

I haven’t heard from them. 🤷‍♀️

I guess no feedback is good feedback?

Why This Matters (To Me, Personally)

Here’s the thing: I was genuinely thrilled to help WHO put their learning platform into Czech. Not because it was glamorous work (it wasn’t), but because somewhere out there, a Czech speaker might need to access health education. And because I volunteered a few hours of my time, they’ll be able to understand it.

That’s the power of language work in humanitarian contexts. It’s not about me. It’s about ensuring that language is never a barrier to safety, dignity, or opportunity.

My guess is the need for Czech is probably less urgent than the need for languages like Ukrainian, or especially Indigenous and tribal languages where there truly are no resources available. But every language matters. Every person deserves access to information that could save their life.

The Bigger Picture: Clear Global

Quick note: In 2021, TWB created a new organization called CLEAR GLOBAL to further build on and expand their work. In addition to TWB’s translation and interpretation services, Clear Global focuses on language technology, research and data, and broader language and communications services. Definitely worth checking out their website!

Want to Help? Here’s How

If you have language skills — in ANY language — please consider volunteering with Translators without Borders.

Here’s what I love about it:

  • Participation is voluntary — there’s no pressure to do more or less than you want
  • Clear deadlines — each project has one, but if you can’t meet it, just don’t sign up for that work
  • Great way to help people while expanding your exposure to language technology and techniques
  • Training opportunities — TWB offers training for volunteers on language technology, translation theory, and various language-related issues

It’s meaningful work. It’s flexible. And it genuinely makes a difference.

You can use your professional skills — the ones you’ve spent years developing — to help people in crisis understand information that could save their lives.

How often do we get to do that?

Ready to volunteer? Visit translatorswithoutborders.org to sign up. And if you do, let me know! I’d love to hear about your experience.

PS You can see my personal TWB page here (assuming you have access). Even small contributions add up to something meaningful. 💙

From Government to Language Consulting: A New Chapter

Yes. Hello.

I retired from the US Government after 21 years of service yesterday. The emotions! Joy, grief, excitement. Little bit of fear. But mostly gratitude. For a career with people and experiences that pushed me waaaay beyond what I ever thought I could do or become. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you, NSA.

And now it’s about what’s next.

Earlier this summer I set up my sole-proprietorship Language Consulting firm – AC Stepan WordWorks, the focus of which is frankly still evolving. At first I wanted to do ALL THE WORD THINGS: Editing! Translation! Teaching! English! Slavic! ALL THE WORDS!

My exuberance has been moderated over the last few months- and not in a bad way. What I know is this: I’m committed to doing work that brings me joy, helps the world in some way, and allows me the flexibility to spend time with my beloveds, to include my garden and my bicycles.

During a few months of experimentation on various freelance platforms and tries-and-fails (for instance why am I regularly offered tutoring opportunities for Serbian*? I don’t do that one…) I have gained some clarity.

What I love is foreign languages and cultures. Specifically of the Slavic kind. My first love was Russian, but my sole mate (soulmate!! but also- Freudian slip?) is Czech. Also of course that’s probably the most difficult one I could have chosen. Very on-brand for me.

I’ve got my hands in a lot of pies at the moment (AbFab reference- “Eddie Pie Hands”) — I’m testing out Translation Memory tools like MemoQ, Phrase, and CafeTran Espresso. I’m playing around a lot with MT solutions (everyone knows Google Translate, but DeepL is really good, especially for Czech). I’m definitely partnering with AI like ChatGPT, Claude, and Perplexity- while they don’t get everything right, and you definitely have to “trust but verify” (or maybe not even trust)- I’ve found them a great “starting point” resource to ask tricky grammar questions related to the way things might be translated and why– for instance, did you know web pages are conceptually “flat” in Czech whereas tabs and address bars are “three dimensional” and thus require different prepositions for expressions involving “putting things on them / in them” – not unlike English in this case!

If you mean paste into the address bar of the browser → then it’s a container, so Czech uses vložit do adresního řádku.

If you mean paste into a new tab → Czech still treats the tab like a container, so it’s vložit do nové karty / do nové záložky (depending on which browser terminology you’re following!)

If you mean paste onto a webpage → Czech treats the page like it’s a surface, and it’s vložit na stránku.

Don’t get me started. We’ll be here all day.

I’m volunteering time and skills with a number of efforts – mostly involving Czech ↔ English translation. I’m exploring some data annotation work / model training work as well- in English but also in Czech. I just discovered Language Reactor (hello, where have I been?) – what an awesome tool for language learning! And it has a really interesting media upload / transcription / translation capability as well.  

So, this blog is part of all of … that. I will say traditionally I have been terrible at keeping up with blogging. I’ll do a post or two then get busy with other things and then that’s it. It’s the same way with diaries and journaling. I can sustain about two entries, max.  But I am committed to posting regularly here in my new life, because I am excited about everything I am learning and some of the projects I am starting to be involved in.

So here I am- 1 October 2025. Day 1! Thanks for reading! And more to come!

*I believe the current formal name of this language is Bosnian/ Croatian/ Montenegrin/ Serbian, or BCMS. The requests I receive ask for Serbian, full stop.