I am curious as why the writer chose that particular picture to illustrate his article and how it relates. Does anyone read arabic enough to translate? I don’t need a word-for-word translation, but the gist of the text would be nice.
I tried an online free translation service, and it returned gibberish.
(Since this is a blog and therefore dynamic, just in case the article in question isn’t at the top of the page, look for the snow on road picture which accompanies it.)
The alphabet may be Arabic, but the language is Persian. No wonder your online translation didn’t work, if you set it to translate from Arabic. Persian is a completely different language. Arabic is a Semitic language, related to Hebrew and Ethiopic. Persian is an Indo-European language, related to English as well as Latin, Russian, Greek, Sanskrit, etc.
The header on that article reads: “Snow is a recurring problem-maker” or “Snow is making problems again.” I don’t have time to translate the rest of it. I’m sorry, but my eyes are getting too old to read the tiny Arabic fonts on web sites. People keep sending me web pages in Arabic and Persian but I can’t even see the damn things because the font is set too small. Maybe I should order a special pair of glasses. The font-enlarging functionality on the View menu doesn’t work.
Thanks for the help, Johanna. I tried looking for Persian (Farsi, right?) to English online translators. Not common. I even found one that went from English to Farsi only.
From this site, I ran a block of text thru it and got:
More words than 125, then want $.01 per word, but if that’s the best they can do, I sure don’t see paying more.
The gist of the articles is that due to all the snow this blogger has been unable to write for awhile, blah, blah blah. There is no mention of the picture in the text.
A little background info: Tehran is having it’s harshest winter in decades and there was a snowstorm there this weekend.
Thanks, Cap’n. I guess the blogger sees my snowy picture as typical of his country, or just likes it for artistry. Hey, I don’t mind; I’m flattered that he liked the image enough to use it.
But the next time we get a blizzard in Wisconsin and I need to blog it, I’m going to look around for a winter shot of Afghanistan.
To be clear, Persian is generally used to refer to people, Farsi to the language. Given the similarities between the two words, I expect they come from the same root.
“Persian” is the normal, usual name for the language in English. The people are Iranian. The language they speak is Persian. Farsi is just the Persian name for ‘Persian’. It’s like saying “The German people speak Deutsch.” “The Japanese people speak Nihongo.” “The Greek people speak Elliniko.”
Yeah, I know it’s become fashionable to say “Farsi” for the language nowadays, and dictionaries don’t cover all the changes in popular usage, and popular usage rules the language, not prescriptivists, yada yada yada. Nevertheless, I reserve the right to continue using traditional normal English in this case. “Persian” is still a perfectly valid name for the language. It hasn’t been entirely replaced by “Farsi” yet. When speaking English, I use the English names for things. This used to be considered normal. When speaking Persian, I call it zabân-e Fârsî.
I’ll agree with that if the speaker is being pedantic. However, there is a linguistic phenomenon called code switching, where words from a second language are inserted into the conversation. When speaking to my boss, who is Iranian, I will sometimes refer to his native language as Farsi, the same way I tell him “I hope to get 10 samples today, in sha’llah,” or “Well, considering that this isn’t the Dar al-Islam, your observation of Ramadan is exemplary.” I have also been addressed as sher by an Iraqi PhD I work with, so the presence of two or more active languages, code-switching is more likely to occur (in me, at any rate - you should have heard me when I lived in France for a year).
Do you have Microsoft Works or Word? For works, you can copy and paste the text then enlarge it. You can’t really write in that langauge, but you can make it bigger.
For example, if this actually words and not gibberish on your browser,
با سلامی دوباره به همه عزيزان.از شما که در اين مدت تماس گرفتيد يا اميل زديد متشکرم.بالاخره کمی از مشکلات حل شد.ولی هنوز تعداد زيادی از روستا های استان گيلان در محاصره برف است.فقط تعداد ۱۵۰ مدرسه دچار ريزش سقف شده اند. البته هلی کوپتر ها برای انها بيسکوت می ريزند! رکورد ريزش ۳۶۰ ميليمتر برف در دو روز بينظير است.شايد وسائل مناسب هم موجود نبود ولی استان ما با بد شرايطی روبرو است.ولی خبری که امروز در مورد پيمان کيوتو داشتيم جالب بود:پروتکل کيوتو که در سال۱۹۹۷ به منظور کمک به کاهش روند گرم شدن کره
Hey, that’s really neat. It came out perfect on my browser (IE 6.0). You just copied and pasted it there? It’s more legible here than in the blog. I tried your idea, but the oh-so-sophisticated Word failed to enlarge the Persian text when I pasted it in. Word thought it was a table. “Convert table to text” didn’t allow me to enlarge it either. So I pasted it into the modest WordPad and was able to enlarge it just fine and printed it out.
Yep, copy and paste - I discovered it when I was searching for a translator. My guess as to why Word was not working is that you pasted in the cell from the website. A cell, basically a table for a website, would of probably did what you described. If you want to try it again just select the text and absolutely nothing else above or below the lines in the box. Who knows, might be a quark of some sort.
