Saturday morning Jiajing’s parents and Charles came to my apartment to pick up one of my American mattresses. In America that would be no big deal, but here the process had to clear security and a record was made of what was moved, from where, and to where it was going. My landlord was even contacted and informed of what was happening. After a fairly long time we got the small truck down the sidewalk to my apartment and got the mattress on. Getting out with the mattress was just as hard as getting the truck in, but finally we were on our way.
The mattress had to be carried up to the seventh floor, but they made me watch. They think I am too old to do that kind of work. They got it up to Jiajing’s room and put it on her bed frame. I then made up the bed, which is so different from a Chinese one. It kind of amused them. When I showed them my electric toothbrush and turned it on they thought I was from another world. Anything I had or would do I would show them or demonstrate for them. That way we all had fun together and are then at ease.
We next ate lunch and hooked up my laptop to the Internet. Charles is a university sophomore and is very computer savvy. I began to ask certain questions about translation using the laptop and before long he had installed some Chinese software that would allow someone to write using Chinese. This next led to an example of how Google does translation using this software. I would like to show you some examples.
I can open two sessions of Google or two tabs. Two sessions is faster to use, but I like using two tabs because whenever I open up Google I get both tabs at once. I use the first tab to translate from English to Chinese as shown in the first picture.
In the box I type what I want to say to Jiajing’s mom or any other Chinese speaker. I press Translate and to the right of the box you hopefully get the correct translation. To verify this you can copy the Chinese and paste it in the box shown in the second picture and press Translate. As you can see it came out ok. There have been times when the translation was so bad it didn’t make any sense, but most of the time it is good enough. In the future it will be even better as the software matures.
I want to show another example in which I will type in pinyin to get Chinese which we will be able to translate to English. To use this software you have to write in pinyin because keyboards don’t have Chinese characters.
The mattress had to be carried up to the seventh floor, but they made me watch. They think I am too old to do that kind of work. They got it up to Jiajing’s room and put it on her bed frame. I then made up the bed, which is so different from a Chinese one. It kind of amused them. When I showed them my electric toothbrush and turned it on they thought I was from another world. Anything I had or would do I would show them or demonstrate for them. That way we all had fun together and are then at ease.
We next ate lunch and hooked up my laptop to the Internet. Charles is a university sophomore and is very computer savvy. I began to ask certain questions about translation using the laptop and before long he had installed some Chinese software that would allow someone to write using Chinese. This next led to an example of how Google does translation using this software. I would like to show you some examples.
I can open two sessions of Google or two tabs. Two sessions is faster to use, but I like using two tabs because whenever I open up Google I get both tabs at once. I use the first tab to translate from English to Chinese as shown in the first picture.
In the box I type what I want to say to Jiajing’s mom or any other Chinese speaker. I press Translate and to the right of the box you hopefully get the correct translation. To verify this you can copy the Chinese and paste it in the box shown in the second picture and press Translate. As you can see it came out ok. There have been times when the translation was so bad it didn’t make any sense, but most of the time it is good enough. In the future it will be even better as the software matures.
I want to show another example in which I will type in pinyin to get Chinese which we will be able to translate to English. To use this software you have to write in pinyin because keyboards don’t have Chinese characters.
I want the English for the pinyin word “Woman”. The “o” is third tone. I already entered the “Wo” part. Let us work on the “man” part. As you type letters you get a help box which is easily understood by a Chinese but doesn’t mean anything to me. As they type letters they will finally notice the Chinese characters they are looking for in the help box. They click on it or press the associated number on the keyboard, which selects it and enters it in the text box. When you finish your writing in Chinese you then select translate, which I already did to show you what you would get. In English the meaning is They or Them which is what I expected.
I have left out some of the details but I think you get the general idea.
