hardly famous
by Rach
Tallinn, Estonia
How do you explain reasons for a world trip, your goals for sustainable living, home education (“No, actually, we don’t use a programme”), and what we think of religion (well, the interviewer did ask) all in half an hour? You do your best and you hope that the interviewer will be able to make something of your necessarily succinct answers when she writes a piece for Tallinn’s leading newspaper. You also hope her sidekick, the photographer, will have managed to capture at least one half-decent shot of the family. Tgirl5 certainly flashed him enough natural smiles and even ERgirl2 posed exactly where he asked for that typical newspaper-type shot of something cute/sombre/substantial/kitschy (in this case, cute) in the foreground with the rest of the story blurring into the background (that would be the rest of us).
We have no idea what the political leanings of the paper are, what kind of stories they usually publish, or even why they wanted to interview us. It will be interesting to see what they write, although I doubt we’ll understand even a word of it – Estonian is such a different language to any we’ve come across so far. You’ll be able to find it at www.epl.ee in a few days’ time – or if that doesn’t help, click here for the Babelfish translation. (Added later: here is the article, but Babelfish doesn’t *do* Estonian! Doesn’t even do Finnish, which is Estonian’s closest linguistic neighbour.)
Which reminds me, Babelfish is our new friend.
We’re in motorhome-buying-mode again. And as we’ve bought the first one in Berlin, we need to get the second from Germany too, so it will be easier to sell them at the end of the trip. We both speak a bit of German, but when you want to make sure that the E-bay listing doesn’t have small print about some obscure technical malfunctioning that will potentially cost thousands of dollars when the motor falls out in the Swiss Alps, we’ve taken to throwing each webpage at Babelfish just to be certain. And it just might have saved us….we were considering buying this one:
“The Verdunkelungsrollos goes toward all, up to in the Alkoven, there to absence a rasters. However all are to be exchanged relatively fast.”
Of course, it would help if the translations were accurate, but let’s just say it’s a good thing we have that rudimentary Germanic knowledge, because sometimes something gets lost in translation and it comes out exactly opposite!
I’m sure the Estonian newspaper will do a better job – espeically as we told them we love the place! But what’s not to love about Tallinn?
Tags: children, craft, dress, housing, learning, postcard: Estonia, souvenir, tradition
rayres
What an amazing looking city. Why haven’t I heard of Talinn before?!
Google Translate does Estonian! 🙂 Syntax isn’t quite spot-on though 😉