Now that the Unfortunate Photobucket Affair is over (for the time being) it's time to do some long overdue showing off. Remeber that French Romanov book I was fussing about being unable to read? I was being a trifle over-dramatic. Because, ta-daa, I got THIS for Christmas:
All I do is swipe this little do-jiggy over your text like a hilighter, and it scans and/or translates on the spot. The bugger recognizes 128 different languages, and can instantly translate 11 language pairs, including French and -- get this -- Russian.
This is me on Christmas morning, expressing my amazement with a phrase I don't care to repeat in a public arena:
(My parents were smart enough to hold this gift until the last, as the present opening ground to an absolute halt once I started messing with the wonder-gizmo.)And here I am on December 26th, bent over one of my formerly mysterious Russian sources:
Once you get the hang of it, the thing really works. Since Christmas, I've scanned and translated Aleksei Nikolaevich Romanov's entire 1916 diary and browsed through all sorts of random tidbits. With sans-serif text in particular, the scanning accuracy is dead-on. Yeah, it's a machine, so the translations are often grammatically amusing, but if you've got half a clue about the language you're dealing with, it saves oodles of dictionary time. Not to mention the tedium of learning to type in a foreign alphabet. (Which is why Mom said "Ahem!" to my boo-hoo-I-don't-know-French post.)
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Currently reading:
The Bear Makers
by Andrea Cheng
