The only iPad review you need to read

by ekarisor • 16 years ago

80 17 16 years ago

ph0rque• 16 years ago

"Duis aute irure dolor iPad in reprehenderit in voluptate velit esse CEO Steve Jobs dolore eu fugiat nulla pariatur. Windows 7 ha ha ha."

Indeed.

rauljara• 16 years ago

Google translate has Haitian Creole but not Latin? No offense to Haitian Creole, but Latin seems like a pretty important language to be lacking. Anyone know a site for translating from Latin?

aaronbrethorst• 16 years ago

I don't think you're actually supposed to translate it from "Latin" to English. Jason has essentially plugged a handful of meaty keywords from the past few months of frothing-mouthed punditry into a piece of bog-standard lorem ipsum text.

OK, here, I'll translate:

"You've already heard everything you need to about the iPad. It's been covered by everyone from the Today Show to Stephen Colbert to David Pogue from the New York Times, and your mom even has an opinion.

You either made up your mind to buy one or not the second you saw Steve Jobs hold it aloft in Moses-like fashion back in January. Why are you even bothering to read real reviews? You've known exactly what they're going to say for months."

nollidge• 16 years ago

The text is based on the infamous Lorem Ipsum [1] placeholder text, which is pseudo-Latin gibberish, so I doubt you'd get anything out of the translation if it existed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lorem_ipsum

credo• 16 years ago

Perhaps you should also look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole and the number of people who speak Latin.

Then, you may also want to look at the number of people who speak Haitian Creole as their primary (or only) language and compare that with the numbers for Latin.

That may give you a better appreciation for the reasoning behind Google-Translate's prioritization (though I should add that I'd also be surprised if they didn't include Latin)

jf• 16 years ago

I can see the recent disaster in Haiti playing a key part in Haitian Creole taking priority over Latin.

pinstriped_dude• 16 years ago

You should look at how many people who speak Haitian Creole have access to computers and the internet and compare that with people who speak Latin and have access to the net.

compay• 16 years ago

Exactly. There are more than a million natives of Haiti living outside their country, many presumably with potentially decent internet access.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitian_diaspora

And even people who don't have internet access at home can go to an internet shop, translate and print a bunch of documents, and take them home to read offline. So Google is potentially benefitting millions of people by providing this service.

bricestacey• 16 years ago

I have only studied 4 years of latin in high school, but I imagine it would be particularly difficult to create an effective translator for latin. I'm no expert though (only substantive works I translated were book 2 of the Aeneid and some satire by Juvenile).

DrJokepu• 16 years ago

It's very hard to algorithmically translate Latin, a lot harder than other languages. It is an ancient language that was used differently throughout the ages. Obviously the old Latin from the time when Rome was just a kingdom in the Italian Peninsula, the Latin of Virgil, the Latin of medieval laws and the Latin used today in the Vatican are very different from each other, not grammatically or in vocabulary but in idioms, methaphores, etc., stuff that really make a language unique. It is hard enough even for humans to translate old Latin texts sometimes.

Still, I don't doubt that the clever people at Google would be able to manage to do it, I'm just saying that it's a lot harder than translating from or to a modern language.

prodigal_erik• 16 years ago

How much latin text remains that wasn't already laboriously translated by experts centuries ago?

dazmax• 16 years ago

Oddly, I actually learned some stuff from reading this, 'cause it made me look up Shenzhen and Jony Ive.

julius_geezer• 16 years ago

More coherent than some I've read ...

junklight• 16 years ago

Ha ha Kottke channeling the channel 9

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctaszjeaDK0

The only iPad review you need to read

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