Translating into Italian

Etsy is growing... and learning a new language: Italian.

The project started, and many members of Etsyitaliateam are helping in this great issue of translating etsy into Italian.
I've never translated a web-site before. I am very gratefull to my informatics course at University, otherwise html would be an enormous difficoulty. These codes are everywhere while translating and sometimes they make it difficult to understand the real meaning of a very simple sentence or phrase.
It's tricky, but so far is also interesting.

What is strange about it is that it must be functional, there is very little to "read". What we are translating are basic information to surf the great sea of shops on Etsy. Thus, we need to focus on the very use of words.
Another thing to take into consideration is lenght. Bottons and links are supposed to take the same amount of space of the english ones.

Luckily, we have a thread to compare our doubts and talk with the admin to be sure of doing a good job. Once again, what makes Etsy different from other places on the net, is the main idea of community.

Working (and living) with what has to do with languages, I've been wondering about this project before joining. We are doing it as volunteers, we are just partecipating in what we want to became real. We first wanted this site to speak Italian. But translation is also a serious matter, people do it for a living, so... how fair is it doing it for free?
I hope someone is supposed to revise our whole work, in the end. Someone that do it for a living.
So far, once again I am learning something new!

to fly away?

foto from Flickr

I was reading The independent online, and on a lateral ad I saw these words!
I'd like to... In this very moment I'd like to fly away from here, from my "to dos" list, from my job duties, from my whole life... If you are asking yourselves (and even if you are not), yes, I've got a sort of idea of where to fly... and probably I don't even need a plane to go there...

But I'm here, and I feel I should find a way to stay here. It would be easier to escape, or it wouldn't... don't know...

there are so many things I don't know so far...

more Photos!

These days I had time enough and I wondered trough the blogosphere. By chance I found a beautiful blog (click here to see it). The photos you'll see are wedding photos!

I must confess I am not exactly fond of wedding photos, usually (or at least in Italy) there are people in unnatural pose with strange expression on their faces.

But these are totally different! There are unusual landscape and photos taken during the party or the ceremony that seem to reflect the different personality of people. Probably the best thing is go and see!
Hope you'll enjoy as I did!

new opportunities

As you should have understood so far, I'm desperately trying to find a good way to improve my German (I'm not saying that my English is perfect...). I subscribed a blog with German podcast, without finding there a real help, mainly because I have no great time to spend with podcast, but today I found there something very useful for a "languagelearner"!
http://www.bitesizedlanguages.com/
In this site you can subscribe (totally free) and then receive e-mails with words and phrases in the language you are learning. Unfortunately now there are only three languages available:
spanish
portuguese
french
But you can also subscribe for language to come, among which I found German.

In the meantime, I have also subscribed portuguese, because it has always fascinated me. Such a strange language, with a peculiar sound...

What about Christmas?

I was wondering around the blogosphere, and of course reading many posts about Christmas, when I started thinking about writing my own post about Christmas... Then I realized that I 'm supposed to use English to write in this blog of mine, and I was considering how hard it could be to write down all my thoughts about Christmas (my feelings towards this celebration, what I'm doing for it etc, etc...).

To use a second language to express yourself is not that difficult, if you're not describing the way you feel; then you have to make an effort to find the right words, and it always seems to me that there are no words to translate exactly what you mean, because there are so many shades of meaning you're aware of when you're using your mother tongue, that you inevitably feel uncomfortable translating them!

On the other hand, that forces me to think before start writing, instead of writing whatever comes into my head! Which is of course an advantage for people who read my posts, they could never find a subsequence of words that means almost nothing... I hope!

I know that it has not a lot to do with Christmas, but it was thinking about Christmas that I made this sort of thought! So, I'll write something about the celebration during Christmas Holiday!