All entries for Saturday 12 May 2007

Wishful thinking

This was a genuine screen-grab from CNN International.

Adam, I hear there may be a vacancy going…

Christopher Doidge : 12 May 2007 10:08 |  Tags: Cnn George Bush Gordon Brown Journalism News Politics Tony Blair |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

My parents will be so pleased they let me borrow their sat nav…

Writing about web page http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/6646331.stm

It clearly works so well in Wales… This ditzy student followed her GPS system to the letter and ended up getting her car smashed to bits by a train.

Obviously this was the fault of the GPS system, and not the girl who obeyed everything it said.

How easy would it be to add a road to the GPS database that goes over the cliffs of Dover?

Christopher Doidge : 12 May 2007 10:04 |  Tags: Driving News Satellite Navigation |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Lost in translation

The French seem to have found my blog, after one of their newspapers linked to my thoughts on Gordon Brown. In honour of my new visitors, you can now translate the front page into five languages (French, German, Spanish, Chinese and Arabic) by clicking on the icons in the sidebar.

In the last thirty days, 93% of readers’ first language is English, French is about 2%, and German, Spanish and Polish are about 1% each. Unfortunately I can’t translate into Polish at the moment.

I wonder how native French, German or Chinese speakers navigate the mostly English internet. Do they have a toolbar that translates into their own language anyway? Do they just get on with it and use English? Or are these sort of icons useful?

Feel free to suggest any other languages, although I’ve got no evidence that anyone’s trying to read this in Inuit.

^{Incidentally, whoever’s viewing this in a screen resolution of 2560×1024, stop showing off. And I’m surprised so many people are using Firefox now – around 35% compared with IE’s 60%. Finally, 3% of you are using Microsoft Vista. Are you brave, or simply mad?}

Christopher Doidge : 12 May 2007 00:27 |  Tags: Blogging Translation |  Comments (3) |  Close comments |  Report a problem