Friday, July 30, 2004

Online dictionaries

I was IMing with a colleague in South Africa this afternoon and when he greeted me with “g’day”, I responded with “goie more” (ghoo … ia … more … rra). Some conversations later, getting ready to sign off for the day, he bid me “tot siens” together with the Afrikaans for “miss”. I went online to see if I could quickly find the Afrikaans for “mister” and even though I did find a site, I couldn’t find an English-Afrikaans translation for “mister” or “Mr” or “sir”. I was obviously asking the wrong question; the wrong terminology – but that raised the question, if you don’t know the language, how can you find out “stuff”.

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