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Communicating through the Internet across Languages

Sunday, July 1, 2007

The Internet is so fun, I love it!

Was uploading some photos to my PicasaWeb album and noticed that someone had managed to find my photos and had left a comment! Yay me!

It didn’t bother me much that the comment was in what seemed to be Spanish, or that for all I knew it could have been spam. But I did what any curious geek would do: I ran it through a translator.

ES UNA HERMOOOOSURA ..
DE PERRITO =)
PUPPY,
EL DEL ANUNCIO DE PAPEL PARA LIMPIARSE EL CULO

becomes:

IT IS A HERMOOOOSURA. OF SMALL DOG =) PUPPY, THE ONE OF THE ANNOUNCEMENT OF PAPER TO CLEAN THE ASS

Of course, this is NOT a satisfactory translation. It’s almost offensive at first glance - like they could be saying he should be used to wipe someone’s butt. Or something.

But I persevered. I tried Babelfish with much the same result.

Hermoooosura didn’t translate, and I guessed it might be spelt strangely - like with to many o’s for instance. But Google wouldn’t translate ‘hermosura’ either. A quick search brought up this page and this discussion though, which says it means ‘incredible beauty’. So I believe ‘hermoooosura’ is better translated as ’sooooo beautiful’ - like a young girl might say about a tiny white dog.

Realising that she was probably being nice, I kept trying to understand the translation. Further poking around in translations sites helped me realise that ‘anuncio’ while translated as ‘announcement’ can also be translated ‘advertisement’ or ‘ad’. I then quickly realised ‘paper to clean the ass’ (papel para limpiarse el culo) is actually TOILET PAPER! And it all falls into place. This is my rough translation:

It is soooo beautiful and small =)
It looks like the puppy off the toilet paper ad.

What a lovely thing for a complete stranger to say! And how fantastic that someone I’ve never met - who doesn’t speak my language - can leave me a message, and I actually have a chance to understand her. To actually communicate across languages!

I have since learned that ‘perrito‘ can be translated ‘doggie’ which is even cuter! and ‘limpiarse‘ conjures images of flossing! How marvellous is language?!

Filed in Internet, Thoughts, software | | Comments (0)

ARRGH!

Monday, June 4, 2007

This is stupid.

Filed in Technology, quick thoughts | | Comments (0)

Old Dogs, New Tricks - Internet Explorer 7

Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Out with the Old

This intro is aimed at people who can use the Internet, and are comfortable using the last version of Microsoft’s Internet browser: Internet Explorer 6 (also known as IE6).

You may know, a browser is any program that allows you to view - or browse - web pages. Because Internet Explorer is the most widely used browser, some of you probably know it only as “the Internet”. It looks like this:

Internet Explorer 6 screenshot

and you usually start it with this icon:

Internet Explorer 6 icon

In with IE7

Recently, Microsoft released an updated version of their Internet Explorer browser called Internet Explorer 7 (or IE7). It fixed a lot of problems that IE6 had, and looks a lot prettier. More than the superficial changes though, it adopted a lot of excellent little features that make Internet surfing safer and easier. It’s these changes that I’m going to explore in this article, so you can learn what makes IE7 different and get used to using it in your school or at home.
(Continued)

Filed in Internet, old dogs new tricks, software, tech | | Comments (3)

Our job.

Tuesday, May 15, 2007

They do what on the Internet?

I recently spoke to a staff member at one of my schools who in all respects is a lovely person, but who shocked me thoroughly when we started talking about ‘the Internet’. The topic somehow came to MySpace in particular, and in general the idea of putting personal stuff out there for all to see. Now this person has a child, and their opinion was that they would never let their child do anything online that might expose them to the dangers of the Internet. This sounds good and proper - but my shock was at what their idea of Internet danger extends to.

“Do you believe that some people use the Internet for banking!?!!”

they exclaimed.
As I was about to explain that actually the ‘net is getting very good at keeping everything you put out there safe I was forced to cut the conversation short to reset yet another password.
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Filed in Blogging, Internet, Technology, Thoughts | | Comments (4)

Tools for Schools: add notes and share a page with Jump Knowledge

Friday, May 4, 2007

Jump Knowledge example

Here’s an easy to use little app for both staff and students. It’s called Jump Knowledge (jkn for short) and it allows you to grab a copy of any webpage you’re reading and write whatever you want all over it (called annotating).
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Filed in software, tech, tools for schools | | Comments (3)

Another Blog? Really?

Monday, March 12, 2007

This was my first thought when Al said he’d created an EduBlogs blog for me. I already blog infrequently on two of my own blogs, and it seems every website that ever tried to be ‘two point oh’ offers a free blog. I have an unused blogger account, a wordpress blog that I had to sign up for to use Akismet (an antispam plugin), and if I’d ever been suckered in to using MySpace, Facebook, or any other social site I’d be drowning in the guilt of too many unused blogs.

But I’m not going to feel guilty about this one. I recently made a vow to myself to do something creative daily, and one of the options I gave myself was to blog. Maybe it wont be here, but I should be blogging more regularly. About the same time, Al and a couple of other bloggers he linked to have been inspiring me to have a bit of a say about education. I hesitated because my perspective is not unique - there are hundreds of other IT people in the South Australian education system. I also hesitated because I fear that there is not much I can say that hasn’t been said already by people who can write betterer.
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Filed in Personal, tech | | Comments (1)