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

(Some) People Nowadays

My internet went down for 5 minutes

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Postmodern family life for some?

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).