Would say that Google Translate is useless, except that it isn’t quite. It is pretty hopeless with long passages, and bravely invites the user to rate the translation at the end of an incomprehensible attempt. Have given up looking for translation of posts of any length by Turkish friends, though short comments often doable. Oddly enough sometimes reminds me of interchanges in my childhood between my parents which we were not meant to understand. In the earliest days these were in French, but soon my French was better than my mother’s, although never better than my father’s. And so they resorted to German, where once again my father’s vocabulary was much larger than my mother’s, leading to funny sentences where the little words were in German but a couple of the most important ones were in English and the meaning completely undisguised. Reminded of this when Google Translate appears to resort to the same method: “ This serzenis is right; we have done all our vecibelerimizi against the EU, but the EU did not fulfill its vecibelerini to us”. Made only slightly worse by GT not making use of a Turkish keyboard for the undigested bits, so the diacritical marks disappear. However, what GT does do is provide audio pronunciation of words, which can be very helpful.
Bread rationing over. We were never short of food at all, but in common with much of the world short of particular items, in our case bread. And somehow being able to substitute bowls of barley or rice didn’t seem satisfactory. This not because there is a shortage locally but because we went to the shop too late in the day for our initial provisioning. So breakfast has meant one slice each, and of a plain white bread such as we have not bought in memory. Happy to know now that our shop has plenty and much better. Just necessary to go earlier in the day. At home I would just have made the bread. Here the oven is actually better than ours but our pantry here less, and differently, stocked. Just as long as the global supply chains hold out....It’s a very long time since most people ate only what grows in their own country, and much of that still involved preserving for out of season use.
Birds outside in the early afternoon making an enormous fuss, a couple of dozen of them, black and smaller than crows, swirling overhead repeatedly and prophesying disaster. I suggest it’s a little like what they do when fireworks start and J says it’s more like Hitchcock. He’s right, they’re not escaping, they’re warning and at some length.
We live in a pretty quiet backwater here. Have only once seen a police car drive slowly past. There are reports, though, of police stopping people on their way back from the grocery store and asking to see their receipts. Have no idea how they would prove they were on their way TO the grocery store. In any case ours is about a three minute walk so we’re unlikely to be questioned.
Bread rationing over. We were never short of food at all, but in common with much of the world short of particular items, in our case bread. And somehow being able to substitute bowls of barley or rice didn’t seem satisfactory. This not because there is a shortage locally but because we went to the shop too late in the day for our initial provisioning. So breakfast has meant one slice each, and of a plain white bread such as we have not bought in memory. Happy to know now that our shop has plenty and much better. Just necessary to go earlier in the day. At home I would just have made the bread. Here the oven is actually better than ours but our pantry here less, and differently, stocked. Just as long as the global supply chains hold out....It’s a very long time since most people ate only what grows in their own country, and much of that still involved preserving for out of season use.
Birds outside in the early afternoon making an enormous fuss, a couple of dozen of them, black and smaller than crows, swirling overhead repeatedly and prophesying disaster. I suggest it’s a little like what they do when fireworks start and J says it’s more like Hitchcock. He’s right, they’re not escaping, they’re warning and at some length.
We live in a pretty quiet backwater here. Have only once seen a police car drive slowly past. There are reports, though, of police stopping people on their way back from the grocery store and asking to see their receipts. Have no idea how they would prove they were on their way TO the grocery store. In any case ours is about a three minute walk so we’re unlikely to be questioned.