New Thing #27--Say What?

Today's idea comes from my friend JD, who edits the blog CraftGossip Crochet. Her post of February 4th concerned translating non-English Websites into English.

Quoting from CraftGossip, the procedure is:

• Find a blog you want to view and go there.
• Copy the web address.
• Go to www.google.com and paste the web address into the search box.
• When the site appears, click the link NEXT to the web address that says something like this ‘translate this page’.
• It just takes a few seconds for the huge old cyberbrain in the ether to give a reasonable facsimile of English from Russian, French, Japanese, Portuguese, whatever. Really amazing

One of the things I like to do when I have time to kill is to look at different blogs on Blogspot. There is a "Next Blog" button at the top of the page that will take you to a random site. Many of these are in other languages. I applied JD's principles to translate a Website from another language.

It worked! I read pages translated from Portuguese, Spanish, French, Greek, and Italian. None of the translations were particularly good, but I was able to figure out the captions to some of the pictures; it was nice to know the names of the strangers that were looking at me from my computer screen.

I also found a couple of English blogs that I bookmarked to go back to later.