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Lost in translation — 19 Comments

  1. The usual response of the English speaking world when confronted with someone who purports not to speak the universal tongue is just to raise the volume, on the basis that they probably didn’t hear you the first time around. I guess on the written page, all you really needed to do was to have a button to engage caps lock. Why pander to all those lazy bastards who can’t be bothered to learn English?

    • There is that argument indeed.  However there is the chance that those lazy bastards could be missing out on my life-changing pearls of wisdom?

    • “…raise the volume…”  and add manic hand gestures 🙂

      Anyway, it’s all Greek to me.

  2. Grandad, just incase you haven’t noticed , the last few days, the site takes far too many ‘chimpanzees’ (being the aged geek’s standardised measurement of time -as ‘Wales’ is for area) to load the Scriberlus & Other Shit link boxy thingys. Also the ‘Leave a reply’ box seems to have problems getting through the ether. I’m on Firefox btw…and have turned off uBlock. Revenge of the Used Toilet Paper background perhaps?

    • I hadn’t noticed.  They do seem to be taking a little while though, which is very strange as neither has to go outside the site to fetch contents.  On second thoughts, I think I may know what’s wrong……

      The Leave a Reply thing is because of the facility to edit a comment for a period of minutes [as requested by my loyal readership].  I could remove that facility??

    • Heh!  Blame Google or my little team of translators in the engine room.

      I found one bug – change language and the selection is re-sorted, so if you don’t know the Chinese for English, don’t try it!

      There is a version with little flags but they slow the site considerably.

      • Just taken a look at the site in German….it’s not as bad as Claudia makes out and honestly better than I had feared. Yes it’s all kinds of wrong all kinds of places and starts with such a memorable possible future catch phrase you’ll get a call from Henning Wehn. Yes the translation is more Yoda than Luther but I will contend that any non-english speaking German would have no trouble ‘getting the gist’ of your post from the  translation…once their eyes had stopped bleeding ….not that there are many Germans with internet access who don’t speak better English than thee and me.

  3. Of course I had to set the page to Gaelic just to see what it looked like. I really enjoy hearing it spoken out loud but the written word is a bit of a jumble to me. And I’m sure the translator jumbled it up. Then I had a heck of a time getting the site back to English since I couldn’t understand what the translator menu was showing me. I finally persevered though.

    As far as English is concerned, after 1400 years of development beginning with the Germanic folk settling in what it now the British Isles (English is still considered a West Germanic language), modern day English is a language that includes words, terms and phrases from multiple languages, some with more than one meaning. No wonder English is considered one or the most difficult languages to learn.

    And if you think American English is bad you should hear the dialects of people from different states. Even different areas of a particular state. Between some horrendously different accents there’s words, terms and phrases that might as well be a different language altogether.

    Take a person from rural Tennessee and put him in a room with a lobster fishermen from Down East Maine and they’d be lucky to get past saying, “Hello”, to each other.

    • Heh! I remember when I was young I met a Texan girl, and I genuinely thought at first that she had a serious speech impediment! That said, when I was living in London in the eighties, I used to drink with a guy from Newcastle, and we’d been mates for six months before I actually started to understand what he was saying.

  4. The other half is mortified; no Finnish… And take it from me, you don’t want to go upsetting a Finnish lady.

  5. The Latin is a bit of a mess, though I can make some sense of it. Julius Caesar or Cicero would not approve.

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