Sunday, May 16, 2021

SELF BUBBLE

Sometimes, often, I feel guilty for posting stuff about me me me when the world outside this little selfiebubble is bursting at the seams with every possible and impossible kind of suffering. But then I say to myself, hey, your guilt is as useless as your opinion on the suffering. Neither of them is going to make the slightest bit of difference to the misery happening right now, or yesterday, or tomorrow everywhere on this planet. If you were one of those who choose to dedicate their lives to alleviating or finding solutions to at least one form of suffering then you might have something useful to say about it. But you’re not and you don’t.

So, more stuff about me. Out today in the culture Sunday supplement of ABC Color, a Paraguayan newspaper, is this article by Amalia Ruiz Dias:

And Richard Price sent me the latest issue (No.34) of his Painted, spoken printed magazine which includes my article: My life will eventually be in your hands.

I’ll post about this next.

4 comments:

Vincent said...

Thanks for the link to this very good article. As I suspect most of your readers, like me, are not fluent in Spanish, they may like to follow this link to my latest post on Wayfarer's Notes.

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...

Vincent, thank you very much for featuring me again on your blog and for going to the trouble of translating the Paraguayan newspaper article. I should have posted a translation( I can still speak and read Spanish) but the article is long - longer than the excerpt you posted - and I figured that anyone patient enough could resort to Google's laughably inept translation robots and work out the meaning. You've done a much better job than the robots generally do - what was the method you used? I'm sure it wasn't a dictionary!

Vincent said...

The method was simple, really. Having discovered that the newspaper doesn't allow you to copy and paste its text, I had to (1) take a series of screenshots, (2) submit them to a site called https://www.onlineocr.net/ , (3) tell them the language is Spanish, (4) click "convert", (5) copy the resultant text, (6) paste it into Google Translate (7) paste the English version into Wordpress. The operation took a few minutes. The only edit was a single change of "his" to "her". The technique is powerful and free.

I rather like the comical way Google Translate fails to produce an idiomatic output, as in

"The mural is an artistic discipline that always refers us to a culture whose codes the artist, as a visionary, transmits, while recounting the events in the environment."

I don't know how long it would take to make sense of that in English, if at all!

Natalie d'Arbeloff said...

This Google translate example is not only inaccurate but sounds just like the pretentious jargon spouted by some highly regarded critics etc. like those quoted in Pseuds Corner (Private Eye).

Thanks for all the trouble you went to! I have no problem capturing any text or image that shows up on my old Mac laptop, using the 'Grab' icon. Using this I saved and copy-pasted the article for my own files.