Unfortunately, my first post has to deal with some more technical topics:

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We expect indeed that the entries in this blog are read not only by German people but also by people whose native language is either English – in particular, among these are my aunt Jackie and my uncle Brian (each second degree), as well as their partners, children and grandchildren – or perhaps neither German nor English, but French or Italian or Dutch.

We will post the articles in this blog initially in German. If we have the time, in some cases we will also provide an English translation of the same, but certainly that will not always work.

Yesterday and on the day before I spent some time in investigations about possible components („plugins“) that provide multilingual support in one form or another, and I think I have now found a solution that is still not an optimum, but at least it is a good compromise.

What then is the solution?

Well, in the right column of the browser window, or on mobile devices relatively far down on this page you will find a button „Search“ or “Suchen”, and below it a heading „Translation“, and a little further down the heading „Recent Posts“ or “Letzte Beiträge”. Between these two headings you now see not just one but two drop-down boxes that allow to select a language. This is by design, so to say. The two selection options control two different translation modules, both of which cause similar effects, but in different ways, namely as follows:

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With the top selection option immediately under the heading „Translation“, labeled „Select Language“ and „By“ and the Transposh logo (colorful twist) in the following line, you can translate the entire page to the target language. Please note: This is initially a machine translation (in this case it comes from „Bing Translator“), but this is special: We can manually rework the translation wherever we see the need to do so, and the tool keeps track of these corrections and will also show them to subsequent readers. By the way: If anyone of you likes to contribute to this correction business, then he or she should let me know, preferably by e-mail.

However, this feature has a catch: It only works for texts that were originally transmitted in German (posts or comments). It seems that this tool is unable to translate texts that are set in a language other than the one which I specified as the original language of this blog. In particular it can NOT be used to translate posts or comments written in English into German, and especially those translations cannot be corrected or enhanced.

To compensate for this disadvantage, I have decided to include also the second language switch, which controls another translation plug-in:

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With the lower selection option, labeled with „Select language“ and the Google logo below, you can activate the „BabelZ plugin“. By doing that, you can also get an automatic translation of the entire page – with all faults that such translations usually have. In this case the translation is done by „Google Translator“. Here the disadvantage is that with this option no corrections can be made or saved. On the other hand, this option has the advantage that it can translate English comments into German (or other languages), i.e. the plugin software usually detects automatically in which language a post or a comment was written.

However, please be aware that if these two translation plugin components are used in a „criss-cross mixed“ manner, they might behave in a silly or confusing way. For example, I would say that it’s not a good idea first to use the BabelZ / Google translation to translate everything into Dutch, and then to use the Transposh-/Bing translation to translate everything from Dutch into Italian – such a thing can only lead to chaos .

So if you have first used one of the translators and now want to use the other, then I suggest that you press the „Back“ button of your browser repeatedly until you return to the original representation – that is, to the German version for the majority of the posts, and to the original language of the comments.

Ok, now I’ve bored you with a lot of technical stuff. Nevertheless, I hope you will enjoy reading the posts that are still to come, and I promise that my future posts will not be as technical as this one!

Ciao, Martin

P.S.: In most cases, our posts will not be translated into separate posts. In that sense, this post is an exception. For all other posts, please use the language selectors as explained above.

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