{"id":2200,"date":"2012-05-31T15:29:18","date_gmt":"2012-05-31T19:29:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/?p=2200"},"modified":"2012-05-31T16:04:30","modified_gmt":"2012-05-31T20:04:30","slug":"listening-post-found-in-translation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/2012\/05\/31\/listening-post-found-in-translation\/","title":{"rendered":"Listening Post: Found in translation"},"content":{"rendered":"<div id=\"attachment_2201\" style=\"width: 160px\" class=\"wp-caption alignright\"><img aria-describedby=\"caption-attachment-2201\" loading=\"lazy\" class=\"size-full wp-image-2201\" title=\"worldinhand_150\" src=\"http:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/files\/2012\/05\/worldinhand_150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/><p id=\"caption-attachment-2201\" class=\"wp-caption-text\">FreeTranslation.com is another machine translation tool<\/p><\/div>\n<p>Like way too many Americans, English is the only language I can get around in. I can hack away at French and German a little, using the tattered and never-fluent remnants of my high school education, but if it&#8217;s not in English, it&#8217;s pretty much lost on me.<\/p>\n<p>That means I have been cut off from that 73% of the users of the internet who use languages other than English. That means that I have to rely on the English-speaking media of the world to shape my impressions of what&#8217;s happening elsewhere, and what it means. It means that I am necessarily a little ill-informed and provincial in my outlook, and poorly prepared to cope in a world of rising and largely unknown cultures.<\/p>\n<p>At 58, I am unlikely to take up and make much progress in conversational Mandarin&#8211;insufficient brain plasticity. But I could really use something like the Universal Translator popularized on <em>Star Trek<\/em>. While I don&#8217;t need to converse with Klingons, it would be nice to understand what Afghans are writing about the war, what Greeks are saying about the European economy, what the Mexican press is saying about immigration, or the war on drugs.<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been out of touch with machine translation technology since I first checked it out in its clunky infancy, ten years ago. But now I find that something approaching Star Trek-level technology has emerged, and is easy to use online. The form I have been using is the <a href=\"http:\/\/translate.google.com\/translate_buttons\">Google Translate Bookmarklet<\/a>. You select your native language from the list and drag it it up to the favorites bar in you web browser. Visit a website written in German, click on the translate bookmark, and the result is perfectly comprehensible English. Same with Russian or Portuguese. Sorcery! No really, it is very cool&#8211;better with European languages than Asian ones&#8211;but useful across the board.<\/p>\n<p>Now it is only habit that keeps me in my language ghetto. But that habit slowly breaks down as I begin to explore a wider world of thinking than I ever imagined, and discover that I believe a lot of things that ain&#8217;t necessarily so. That&#8217;s news I can use.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Like way too many Americans, English is the only language I can get around in. [&#8230;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[6128],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2200"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2202,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2200\/revisions\/2202"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2200"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2200"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.northcountrypublicradio.org\/allin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2200"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}