Diane wrote, At 03:40 PM 12/31/2009, you wrote: >I have discovered something new in Google Translate: Detect Language. > >I wasn't sure which language Marco's out-of-office message was written >in, as Spanish to English didn't work at all, but Detect Language knew >it was Italian, and translated it. > >Very useful. I wonder how it will manage with rarer languages? Using online machine translation is still a gamble! I'll never forget the letter I got that had been translated into English from German using one of these applications, and if you know German and that the letter was about exchanging seeds, you will know why I fell on the floor laughing. Our area newspaper sometimes runs a humor feature with examples of what happens when you run an English sentence into one of these machine translation apps, then run the result back into English. I don't mean to denigrate the efforts of specialists in computational linguistics (an actual subdiscipline), but I think there will long be a use for human multilingualism. It is nice to hear we have a correspondent in Iceland (the lovely old characters for our modern English th's are an instant clue). Hafsteinn, don't give up on bulbs: I started to grow them when I lived in interior Alaska, chilling them in pots under the bed in my cabin, where the soil sometimes froze. I put them under grow-lights to flower them, as the winter sunlight was so brief and dim. Best wishes for the New Year, Jane McGary