In the last year of so, the prominence of the courts interpreting contract fiasco has diminished, even though the actual problem itself has never gone away.
For instance, Wednesday’s Ilford Recorder reports that a new court date has had to be set for a man charged in connection with a stabbing in Ilford “because there were no interpreters available to translate for the defendant”.
Marcel Criahan, of Hickling Road, Ilford, appeared at Snaresbrook Crown Court via a video link yesterday after being arrested on 17th October in connection with an incident in which police found 49 year-old Florin Onea with a stab wound. After Onea died last Monday, police launched a murder investigation.
34-year-old Criahan was charged with GBH with intent on 18th October and appeared at Barkingside Magistrates Court the following day.
Today’s Guardian reports that organisers of the “Feira do grelo” food festival in As Pontes in Galicia were shocked when their event celebrating the culinary delights of turnips tops, a traditional staple turned out to be celebrating a rude part of the female anatomy.
To quote The Guardian’s piece:
But for the past few months, the small town was marketing a very different kind of festival after it used Google Translate to put the Galician word grelo into Castilian Spanish, ending up with it inviting people to take part in a “clitoris festival”.
And quoting yet again:
It meant the town’s “Feria [sic] do grelo” or rapini festival – held every February with tastings and awards for the best grelos – became “Feria clítoris” in Spanish.
Clitoris? Yes, according to Google Translate!Furthermore, The Independent adds that the error was not discovered until Castilian-speaking rapini fans visited the site to read about the upcoming festival and found themselves reading about a local clitoris festival instead of the benefits of the local vegetable.
The humorous consequences were fully reported in The Local.
The Castilian Spanish version of the town council’s website’s content about the festival included such howlers as “The clitoris is one of the typical products of Galician cuisine,” and “Since 1981, the festival has made the clitoris one of the star products of the local gastronomy.”
The reason for this embarrassing howler is that Google Translate mistakes the Galician grelo for the Portuguese word grelo – which is both the word for the vegetable as well archaic slang for clitoris.
“It’s a very serious error on the part of Google and we are thinking about making an official complaint for Google to properly recognise the Galician language so this kind of thing doesn’t happen again,” said town hall spokeswoman Montserrat Garcia.
Along with Spanish, Galician is an official language in Spain’s north-western region of Galicia, where over 2.4 million people speak the regional tongue.
Away from the world of alpha versions and bug hunting sessions (posts passim), The Document Foundation yesterday announced the arrival of LibreOffice 5.0.3 “fresh”, the 4th release of the LibreOffice 5.0 family, and LibreOffice 4.4.6, the 7th release of the LibreOffice 4.4 family. Based on feedback from both users and the media, the LibreOffice 5.0 family is the most popular version of this free and open source office suite to date.
LibreOffice 5.0.3 is more feature-rich and as such is aimed at power users and tech enthusiasts, whilst LibreOffice 4.4.6 is targeted to more conservative users and enterprise deployments as it has been in widespread use for a longer time and as such offers a better experience for document production.
For security reasons it is recommended that all LibreOffice users update their software at least to LibreOffice 4.4.6.
Both software packages include many fixes introduced since the previous versions which can be viewed here for 5.0.3 RC1 and 5.0.3 RC2 respectively and here for 4.4.6 RC1 and 4.4.6 RC3.
Download LibreOffice
Both new versions can be downloaded via the following links:
