Freelang’s blog

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OK, it was not as smooth as we hoped it would be. Well, it never is, isn’t it? So maybe you noticed that the site was down for a few hours, then that most pages were loading slowly (due to a script not being authorized by the new server). But the good news is, everything is now back to normal. It’s even much better, as we are running on a much faster server (so the site should load faster than before).

Thank you for your patience!

“We are happy to announce that your current account freelang.net will be migrated to a new server.” This is the message we received from our hosting company. It is great news for us, as it will solve a few problems we’ve been experiencing lately (like loss of statistics data due to too much anti-spam activity), but it is also good news for all Freelang users, as it should improve the site’s performance.

The upgrade should be totally smooth, no downtime and no data loss. Of course we will make backups, just in case. But when we move to the new server, because of what is called “DNS propagation”, a few emails or a few changes in our databases could be lost. So if you send an email and you get no reply from us, please wait a little and send it again. Or if you log in as a translator to modify your data and you find out that the data has not been changed, please wait a little and log in again. Within 24 hours everything should be back to normal. The forum will not be impacted at all by this upgrade.

The sign on the picture below shows a warning in English, with its translation in Welsh. Whoever contacted the translator probably sent her or him an email, got the reply and had it printed it on the sign:

And here it what it says in Welsh: “I’m out of office at the moment. Please send me the text to be translated.”

Isn’t it priceless? Thanks to Anthos for posting this on our forum.

Translation mistakes can be fun sometimes, here are a few other examples that were sent to us by Manuela, another friendly and active forum member.

More fun at engrish.com…

“Wonderful natural and cultural qualities (the Mekong River and the French colonial architecture), but indifference from the government has left it a backwater, challenged by pollution, traffic, congestion, poverty, and unmanaged development. It could have been a great stop on the way to Angkor, but most visitors now avoid it.” With a score of only 36 points, Phnom Penh’s historic area is ranked 109 out of 110 destinations rated by the National Geographic.

Among the last 10 places of the ranking, 7 are in the USA. And as for the top 10, Canada, Japan and Argentina are the only non European destinations. Austria and France are ranked twice in the top 10, respectively for Wachau/Melk Abbey (#1) and Graz (#5) and Aix-en-Provence [#6) and Dijon and Bourgogne region (#7).

About Wachau and Melk Abbey, the National Geographic says: “Each village and town seems to try to outdo the others in promoting local heritage while maintaining cultural integrity. The abbey at Melk is well managed and never seems crowded. Tourist zones are low-key and commercial establishments do not intrude on the visitor’s experiences.”

And about Aix-en-Provence: “The market is lovely and really feels like a classic upscale Provencale market. The historic buildings are well maintained. The city provides ample underground parking so Aix still can feel like a pedestrian town. You can get lost exploring the back streets, and barely sense that this is a major tourist destination. It has always been a noble town, and still feels like one.”

Renato Figueiredo is taking us to a journey round the world, and a journey in time too. We start in Europe in the 17th century, with an Old Prussian dictionary. Old Prussian ceased to be spoken around the beginning of the 18th century. Then we travel to Central Asia, with Abkhaz and Ubykh, both northwestern Caucasian languages. Ubykh is now extinct, as his last speaker died in 1992. Pashto is an Indoeuropean language spoken in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and this is another new dictionary on Freelang. Moving on to north India, with Rajasthani and Oriya, then to Philippines with Cebuano, a Malayo-Polynesian language.

Now let’s go back across the Indian Ocean, and here we are, north of Madagascar and off northeast Mozambique coast, on the French island of Mayotte. French is the official language of the island, but Shimaore is the “lingua franca”. Let’s sail pass the Cape of Good Hope towards America, our last destination. Lunfardo is an argot of the Spanish language, spoken mostly in Buenos Aires (Argentina) and Montevideo (Uruguay), on either side of the Rio de la Plata estuary. We are now entering the deep forest of Brazil, and we meet the Xavante people, who live in the state of Mato Grosso. Finally, in Nicaragua and Honduras, we come across another indigenous language, Miskito.

We hope you enjoyed travelling with us, thank you Renato for being our guide!

Quite frequently, fellow webmasters use our submission form to add their websites to our directory. Our directory has not been updated for a long time and we are thinking of reorganizing it, probably by mentioning the most useful links in the dictionary pages. So instead of having a whole page dedicated to links to other websites, we will keep only a short paragraph, like you can see on our Spanish page, for example. Google likes it better, and I think our users and our fellow webmasters will like it better too.

In the meantime, here are a few interesting websites that have been submitted recently.

Let’s begin by Helcio Domingues’ personal homepage, dedicated to Brazilian Portuguese. You will find grammar lessons and thematic vocabulary lists, as well as a detailed pronunciation guide with MP3 files to download.

Türkiye Sözlük is an interactive online dictionary. It’s all in Turkish so I’m not sure how exactly it is “interactive”, but it looks like a unilingual dictionary. So it’s not a translator, it gives definitions in Turkish.

Our third website is for English learners (beginner level or children) and is actually made of two blogs. The first blog presents vocabulary lists and vocabulary games, with pictures and sound. The second blog offers Flash games: Hangman, Memory, Drag & Drop games…

So McCain is a “maverick”. Palin used that word again, 6 times, during the last debate with Biden on October 2. To her it probably means some kind of a rebel, a nonconformist. But not everybody is happy with the use of the word, especially Terellita Maverick, whose last name has given its origin to the word. It began as far the XVIIe century, when Terellita’s ancester fought for the rights of workers. Then at the beginning of the XIXe century, Samuel Augustus Maverick was known in Texas for not branding his cattle. Non branded cattle was thus referred to as “Maverick’s”. Samuel’s grandson and great-grandson also lived by their name, fighting for individual freedom respectively as a congressman and as a lawyer.

So Terellita Maverick, Samuel’s great-granddaughter, now aged 82, is “enraged” when she hears that McCain is referred to as a maverick, because he has nothing of it, according to her. You know we don’t do politics at Freelang, but we found this story in the New York Times about the origin of the word, and we wanted to share it with you.

We are happy to announce that we’ve just uploaded our 200th dictionary on Freelang! It is a Cherokee-English dictionary, made by Shawn Greene. I would like to thank all the authors for their precious contributions, especially Renato B. Figueiredo, who contributed for 108 dictionaries in less than two years, but also Charles Lippert for maintaining the Ojibwe dictionary, Alexis B. Lemos for his Brazilian Portuguese dictionary, Holger Terkelsen for the Danish dictionary, and Jon McKenna and Shelly Daum for their regular updates of the Afrikaans and Norwegian dictionaries.

There are about 6,000 languages on Earth, so our mission to help preserving cultural diversity is only beginning!

It seems that the new installation process of the Freelang dictionary is working fine. We’ve only had two or three emails reporting problems so far, and we are trying to solve them. We would like to remind our users, though, that the program and the wordlists must be installed in the same destination folder. If you had installed our dictionary before, then it is probably installed in C:\Program Files\Dictionary. But the new installer suggests a new path (for sake of compatibility with Windows Vista), which ends by “Freelang Dictionary”. Therefore, if you wish to download an updated wordlist in the old folder, you have to select “Program Files”, then “Dictionary”, but you also have to delete “Freelang Dictionary” if it is automatically appended to the path by the installer.

Thank you for your patience and please feel free to contact us if you need any help.