Hard to read

25 December 2020

First, perhaps you don’t like my colours. You can switch them off, and then refresh to show the page with neutral colours.

Second, many people surprisingly find the rather unknown language I often write in, Interlingua, easy to understand, without knowing it, even without knowing what language it is. However, that is not the case for everyone, it depends a lot on what other languages you know. Knowing some or a lot of Spanish, Italian or Portuguese for example helps a great deal.

Automatic translators like DeepL, Google Translate and Bing Translator may help you get the gist. But they don’t support Interlingua as a source language.

Now in Google Translate (GT) at least, for as long as it lasts, you can benefit from a strange trick: GT often guesses that Interlingua is Haitian Creole, although that language is not at all similar. Yet, the translation to English which GT then offers based on that assumption, is sometimes astonishingly good, although certainly not perfect. And some phrases are not translated at all.

Even stranger, this trick works for many more languages: Galician, Catalan, Romanian, Corsican, Esperanto, Maltese (an Arabic dialect!), and as said, Haitian Creole. And, I discover today, differently, also Afrikaans.

So here’s my most recent article in Interlingua, now in GT’s attempt at English, and the previous one. And this is the previous one, translated as if it were Afrikaans.