Sarcastic drawings that make fun of our world
It is difficult not to appreciate the creativity involved in these images by Polish artist Pawel Kuczynski, whether or not one agrees with the messages behind them. Pawel specialises in thought-provoking images that question our everyday lives. In my exploration (often critical) of postmodern society, perhaps it is time to use the information available to us, rather than simply take everything at face value and accept it as true.
Link for more of Pawel’s images:
http://news.distractify.com/culture/satirical-paintings/?v=1
Pawel’s website:
http://www.pawelkuczynski.com/index.php
Happy Birthday Google Translate
Here’s the deal: you have just got off the plane at a foreign destination, checked in to your hotel, you arrive to the restaurant, open the menu, and it’s all in a foreign language that you do not speak. You can either open up a chunky dictionary, and scan through until you find out the local translation of “chicken”, “vegetarian”, or “bangers and mash”, or you can break out your iPhone, go to Google translate, and search much quicker (and without the need of bringing the dictionary with you).
Google translate, the online translation that many (if not most) of us have used at some point, is celebrating its eighth Birthday. According to the company’s own blog
(http://googletranslate.blogspot.com.es/2012/04/breaking-down-language-barriersix-years.html), here are some stats:
-Google Translate has more than 200 million monthly active users on translate.google.com.
-More than 92 percent of their traffic comes from outside the USA, showing its global reach.
-Google’s service translates (more or less) as much text as that contained in one million books! Or as the company explains: what all the professional human translators in the world produce in a year, their system translates in a single day.
-The service is available in 80 languages, and working on new ones.
I remember a customer service manager who seriously considered using an online translation service to answer customer queries (reducing native speakers). Google translate, by the company’s own admission, is not for such “mission-critical translations”. Right now, in 2014, nothing quite beats a human being, a native speaker, to deliver a report, a web page, a business presentation, or an answer to a customer. However, if we are looking for help with our language studies for a word we cannot remember, if we are lost in Moscow, or Paris, Austria, or Basel, and we need a helping hand, raise a glass of local wine or beer for the folks who gave us Google translate (in the local language naturally).
-
Recent
- Paris
- Star Wars: The Force Awakens – UK teaser
- The Ocean Clean-up
- Street photographer photographs people on their Smartphones
- Dutch girl fakes 5 week holiday
- There’s nothing worse than being an expert at something obsolete
- Personal Project – my year in Selfies
- Travel Revolution – the Millenials have arrived
- Selfie culture
- CIA joins Twitter
- Suspended Animation….. now
- Science Fiction in Architecture and Design
-
Links
-
Archives
- November 2015 (1)
- November 2014 (3)
- October 2014 (1)
- September 2014 (1)
- August 2014 (3)
- July 2014 (3)
- June 2014 (1)
- May 2014 (4)
- April 2014 (2)
- March 2014 (4)
- February 2014 (3)
- January 2014 (2)
-
Categories
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS