Translation Party is a website built using Google Translate. The idea is to take an English sentence, translate into Japanese, then back into English, and keep going back and forth until an equilibrium is reached and the translation stabilizes.
I tried out various different sentences. Here’s what I got for “China and Japan will never get along“:
I knew Google’s motto is “don’t be evil,” but I didn’t expect that to result in translations that lecture (politely). …
The online Chinese dictionary everyone is using these days is nciku. Newbies and veterans alike all seem to dig it. The quality of the dictionary entries is a refreshing change from the deluge of unimpressive CEDICT clones. One common difficulty among nciku users of all levels, however, is that they can’t figure out how the hell to pronounce the name! Is it N-C-I-K-U, each letter pronounced like its name, or maybe N-C-I-koo, or something like In-see…
The “Language Speakers” bubble chart image below was created as part of IBM’s Many Eyes project:
It’s a really cool project which enables the creation of various types of visualizations given certain data sets. Language lovers will also be interested in the Phrase Net on the Many Eyes blog.…
Waxy.org has an interesting article called Translating “The Economist” Behind China’s Great Firewall. It tells how underground online organization the Eco Team translates every Economist article into Chinese and puts it online.
The greatest part was a line left by commenter Felipe Li:
We’re in your websites, translatin’ your language.
Via Hank.…
My friend Brad made a guitar out of Chinese bamboo. Behold:
Brad is involved with Tonerider, which “produces electric guitars pickups, bass guitar pickups and handwired guitar effects pedals, designed and priced for working musician.”…
It’s that time of year again: vacation absurdity time. Most people in China have to work this coming Saturday and Sunday in order to “make up for” the seven vacation days in a row to come.
Last week was only a four-day workweek (preceded by a three-day weekend), and now this week it’s a seven-day workweek. It’s like jetlag for workweeks; we’re going to need those seven days off to get over the messed-up schedule.
There’s talk of scrapping the …
From the SmartShanghai newsletter:
This week’s newsletter goes out to my DVD lady, who not even one day after being told to shut shop by the filth, opened right up again and ripped me off on a shite copy of Hellboy II.
That’s the kind of tenacity that’s going to make this the century of China.
I’ve heard about the “Olympic DVD Crackdown,” but I haven’t tried to buy any lately. With my computer in the shop, though (it was …
The World, an online public radio program from the BBC, did a brief audio interview with me last week, and it appeared in today’s edition. Here’s a direct link to the 4-minute piece [MP3 download].
To visitors from The World, the work I do on Chinese lessons is actually on a separate site called ChinesePod. Check it out; it’s the best way to learn practical spoken Chinese.
In the interview I talk about my struggles …
The new aggregator in town is Guy Kawasaki’s Alltop, and it’s almost four months old. I really have to wonder if there’s still much of a future for aggregation sites, now that RSS Readers are so freely available. I’ll put that debate aside for now, though.
I became aware of China Alltop when Sinosplice was added to it. I don’t have time to read many blogs these days, but browsing over the various blogs and news sources aggregated on …
John has lived in China for
12.7
years. He is a linguist focused on SLA and tech.
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