OK, after complaining prematurely, I now have Firefox set with English as the only language. But when I read the Guardian or Observer online, I see a block of ads all in German. They look like Google ads, but it doesn’t say Google. They are headed ‘Advertiser links’, are on a small beige block of three or four. They seem to be related to the English stories on the page, but they’re German. I find this irritating – why would I read a paper in English and want to see ads in German?

Example – now (but not much longer) there is an article on inheritance tax problems, and accompanying it are German ads for easy loans.

I’m sure other readers know what is going on here and where they’re getting my location from!

Möchten Sie diktieren, statt tippen? In Windows Media Player, Flash oder Quicktime (Link klicken) demonstriert John Udell auf Englisch, wie er ein paar Sätze in Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 diktiert. Ich war schon bei der ersten Version von Dragon Dictate begeistert, als ich vor einigen Jahren einen Rechtsanwalt in London diktieren erlebte. In der Praxis ist das Programm noch etwas schneller als im Demo, wo es aus technischen Gründen verlangsamt wurde. Das Programm gibt es natürlich auch auf Deutsch.

John Udell demonstrates Dragon Naturally Speaking 8 – click on Windows Media, Flash or Quicktime to see the video (in which the program appears slightly slower than in real life).

Michael Benis reports regularly on voice recognition software in the ITI Bulletin. Here’s a past article by him at transref.org:
and here an article in Translation Journal.

(From Andrew Joscelyne at Blogos)

I will not be posting here till next week, as I am taking a few days off blogging. (Is there a name for that? Comments are disabled though).
LATER NOTE: this is on account of a family 70th birthday and I will also see some fireworks (I mean incidentally, in that you can’t miss them in England on November 5th)

Comments are disabled because I have been getting a very large amount of spam in the last few days. Abnu pointed out that if you limit comment length you can cut out some kinds of spam, but then some comments are long and useful (although maybe 1000 characters is enough). Abnu quotes J-Walk Blog on this.

Comments are temporarily closed.

If you want to comment, send me an email and I will post the comment.

Various stock figures people the pages of English law: the man on the Clapham omnibus, the reasonable man / person, the officious bystander. There is also (new to me), in patent law, the man skilled in the art, possibly to become the nerd.

IPKAT reported on 28 October (topic continued 3 November) that Sir Robin Jacob introduced the term (nice quotes) and was criticized by Lord Justice Pill:

As to the “man skilled in the art”, he is described by Jacob LJ as a ‘nerd’ (paragraphs 7 and 11) and as “not a complete android” (paragraph 10), which suggests that he is part of the way to being an android. A ‘nerd’ is defined in the Concise Oxford Dictionary (10th Edition 1999) as “a person who lacks social skills or is boringly studious” and an ‘android’, in the same work, as “(in science fiction) a robot with a human appearance”. I hope that those working in this field will not regard “men skilled in the art” as figures from science fiction who lack social skills. Jacob LJ, will think me less than supportive of the development of the language of the law but I do respectfully prefer, for its clarity, Lord Reid’s terminology cited at paragraph 7 of the judgment”.

The IPKAT wonders, as do I, if this is the right definition. Of course, the Concise Oxford no longer has the reputation it once did. A commenter quotes the OED: ‘A person excessively interested in something and finds it hard to get along with people’, and links to the nerd test (500 questions, many only for Americans, which may explain why I’m 81% nerd pure).

bq. Readers of Welsh-language websites will be able to get instant English translations with a new computer programme developed by BBC Wales.

bq. Vocab lets users hold the cursor over a word and get an instant translation without having to leave the site.

bq. Developed by BBC Wales’ New Media department, the programme is available free of charge to Welsh-language websites outside the BBC.

There should be more on Morfablog some time, but I can’t understand what it says (unless it integrates the program).

(BBC News, with thanks to Derek Thornton)