I am a Man of Many Languages
No More Babble
As many a person who spends nearly all his time working alone, I rely on AM radio to be the office din. It’s nice to have a voice in the background. Unless it is the 1,000th commercial for…there’s a few that drive me nuts, maybe nothing more than Jay Farner and Rocket Mortgage. Or it is Jamie from Progressive leaving himself a message (“Jamie this is Jamie”), argh. There’s one right now, with this opera singing that’s so awful I cannot think of who’s the advertiser. Then, there’s Babble, an app to teach you languages. In the often played commercial, a guy’s desperately trying to learn Spanish to impress his, implied, hot girlfriend. Who admonishes him that if he is to be successful in his wooing he must know how she makes the cheep cheep sound of a a chicken vs his icy American version of animal noises. No, I cannot imagine ever getting Babble.
Do I even need it? According to the Sources page on my Nexis screen, I have 6,935 international things to use. Many of those are in English, the Toronto Star, The Advocate of Perth, Australia, etc. I also have access to Zeitschrift für das gesamte Kreditwesen and Sud Ouest et Sud Ouest Dimanche and all sorts of other things neither one of us have ever heard of. Like the newspaper I came across the other day, based in a Central American country. Never heard of it. I was, at first, inclined to ignore the article. It was in Spanish. My target was based in the Northeast USA. There’s always noise in a Nexis search. No matter how unusual you think your person’s name is or how tight you think you wrote up the search, you will end up with a person with the same name who turned out to be a high school wrestling phenom or someone who died and left many obituaries. There will always be articles to ignore. A Spanish article, rather an article in Spanish, seemed easy to put in the noise category. Except I knew from the highlighted keywords that regardless of the usefulness of my one year of college Spanish and a lot of tacos eaten over the year, this article was not to be ignored.
People want to say bad things about Google. Believe me, I know they are destroying any privacy I think I may have. Yet, they offer this: Google's free service instantly translates words, phrases, and web pages between English and over 100 other languages. Does Babble teach over 100 languages? From Afrikaans to Zulu, there’s a lot there to use. In general, there are two drawbacks to Google Translate. The biggest issue for me is that it is limited to 5000 characters. That’s not a lot. It often takes more than one copy and paste to get the whole article done. The other big thing is that it will not work off of many pdfs and non-text items. For instance, I use Google Translate often on non-English websites, and there may be parts of the web pages that are just not read and translated. Of course there’s a much bigger issue, one where I really do not want to go. Translation is as much art as science. Take the many versions of Anna Karenina out there. Each with their unhappy families all unlike in their own way. Honestly, I have no idea how good a translation I get from Google Translate. It’s good enough though.
Good enough this week to lead to some interesting findings. My translated article pointed me to a connection, tangential probably, but there, between my guy and somethings notable. There were no other mentions of this issue in English language papers. It was a topic, I’ll tell you, and I’m not saying much more because the topic, the issue is well reported, public, notable, in the news even these days, and if I gave up more, I’d could reveal who I was looking at and what I found, a topic that could have been written up in other papers. Except it was not. It was only in Spanish.
I am, however, a man of many languages. I have nearly 7,000 international publications at my fingertips when I do a Nexis search. I do not care what comes up, in what vernacular, because I know I can read it. I’ll never get you Babble no matter how many times I hear you on my radio.