french

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You can't win 'em all...

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This is the 100th blog post on thewikiman blog, and some of them have been seen more than others. The more widely distributed your stuff, the more likely people are to dislike it. Or rather, the more people who would dislike it if they saw it, see it. So it was inevitable that my Slide-deck about what to expect if you want to work in libraries would eventually recieve some flak as it's the most viewed thing I've done. Due to being featured on Slideshare's homepage, and Liked/Shared on FaceBook + linked to from Twitter nearly 1,000 times, it has been viewed a lot - nearly 15,000 times at the time of writing. By my normal standards, that is stratospheric. It has been favourited 30 times, downloaded 114 times and embeded on 68 websites, including non-English-as-native-language sites, such as Bibliosession. Bibliosession acknowledged a couple of other French sites that had drawn their attention to the deck, and it was because of that I was able to read a comment on lahary.wordpress.com, which, I have to say, is the best piece of criticism I've ever read!

Angry French comment

I used Google Translate to get a better (yet still, I realise, innacurate) idea of exactly how cross they were, here's what it came up with:

Translation: it is "clear " in that these ten laws deserve a place in the annals of cliches and bullshit professional. Even the crap short: in the era of PowerPoint, it is not surprising to see the aphorism as a substitute for thought. And devotees jumping for joy. Not surprisingly: it comes from Britons. And in the land of France, we are always taking the last Anglo-Saxon nonsense.

Woof!

Anyway, Google Translate is always a hilarious source of entertainment, especially when you translate things through multiple languages and eventually back to your own. I mauled this quote through Afrikaans, Croation, Basque, Malay, Traditional Chinese, and Swahili, via a bunch of other languages, ending with Korean - then back to English... And got this:

In fact, silver, Thanks for the information to the Dominican lahar: "This is the correct picture is one tenth of all the dust, Power Point itself, the meaning of the law and professional opinion and, remarkably, not joy, he jumped right is another clear expression ... This is not surprising: the Saxon English inches - including the country of France, always pay close angle. Saxon are all fools - but, Angle, does not mean that. To determine the reference information, and he to the public, answer questions, and where, instead of changing their beliefs, he said, as well as libraryes ..

:)

Ace.

In other news

[NB: Don't click the link in this bit if you read those Harry Potter books and are not yet finished the final book / waiting for the final film to find out what happenes.] A library in Norway has found a truly excellent way to ensure their books get returned when they're overdue. Is this twitpic of a letter sent to a patron - http://twitpic.com/3ro5z9 - real? Who knows - either way, it's a genius idea... Thanks to @Slewth for the link!

- thewikiman