OT Sometimes you really wonder about people

[Andy Burns]

I tend to find machine translation does a pretty good job on Japanese (maybe just on the phonetic character sets?)

[John Rumm]

It can and it does - but it can only really do a bit of a page at a time using the "real time" translate. One could do a better job by scanning all the pages first, then possibly OCR'ing and feeding that to the text based translate, or uploading the images for translation.

It seems to make a reasonably job of it with Japanese - although I suppose not being able to read the original makes that harder to judge. The results are certainly better that much of the Chinglish you see in user manuals!

For example, trying to find out how the Aux In button on the stereo works, got this translation:

"If the optional external input terminal is connected to a car equipped with a manufacturers navigation System, "AUX1" and "AUX2" will be displayed.

AUX1 : Displayed when connected to the navigation AUX terminal. AUX2: Appears when connected to the vehicle's AUX terminal."

[John Rumm]

Many cars have a leaver that sticks down from the bottom of the mirror. It can be put in two positions, and all it does is adjust the vertical angle of the mirror by a specific amount. The mirror has a conventional mirror, with a second semi-silvered mirror placed on top of the first but at a slight angle. You are supposed to set it such that in the "down" position the main mirror reflection shows what is going on behind you. In normal daylight the semi silvered mirror creates a very feint second image that you don't really see. At night when you don't want to get dazzle from headlights behind you, you move it to the other position. That tilts the mirror up a bit. The main mirror now reflects the (not illuminated) headlining of the car, and the semi-silvered one is reflecting what is going on behind. So this second (much dimmer) reflection becomes the primary one you can see.

[wrights...]

I only noticed it a few months back. I only found a volume control on my keyboard last week. Bill

[Andrew]

Whatever fuel it uses, don't switch to one using the other

[Andrew]

Is there any to get Youtube to translate American into English ?

[Andrew]

My 2009 Astra 1.6 does it automatically, somehow, but annoyingly does not do the same with the door mirror which makes motorway driving tedious with so many pillocks driving cars with 'laser' headlamps.

[Andrew]

Buy most fiddling is done in daylight, where the action of said button might not be obvious to the seriously unclued

[Andrew]

The first time I set up an alarm on my smart phone, it took a while before I realised that to cancel it you don't tap it but have to slide the stupid button sideways.

[The Natural Philosopher]

There is nothing more stupid on my StupidPhone™ than a phone app that requires I slide a button to answer a call, but press one to end it.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Is there one to translate the above into English?

[Chris J Dixon]

To quibble slightly, the dimmer reflection is off the front of the glass, with no silvering involved.

Chris

[Tim Streater]

That's because they're not only unclued now, they were unclued previously when what was available was the manual type and it was a lever instead of a button.

[Max Demian]

It's just wedge shaped glass with the silvering on the back. No need for electronics and LCDs.

[ARW]

Saying nothing - but when I asked Lou how long her passenger side wing mirror had been missing (and I knew it was missing before she drove to Wakefield and back to take her parents shopping) she had no idea it was missing.

I then made the suggestion that she should not be driving if she has no idea that a wing mirror is missing.

That was a dry month.

[Tim Lamb]

Hmm. My wife's Fiesta is now on it's fourth nearside wing mirror cover. I blame it on their supposed ability to multitask: probably admiring someone's kitchen wallpaper as she drove by their parked car.

[The Natural Philosopher]

Your mistake is to think they are there for nearside rear vision: Any woman knows they are there as sacrificial distance gauges.

[Tim Streater]

Nah. It should be possible to do that on autopilot. What a lot of people seem to lack is the ability to judge accurately the overall width of the vehicle they are driving. Made worse by so many driving ULVs [1] these days.

[1] ULV: Unnecessarily Large Vehicle.

[Dave W]

True, but if you don't even know the button's there, you have no inkling of a 'failure' requiring some action.

[Dave W]

My milkman has a silent electric milk float, presumably to avoid waking people up. I get woken up by the noise of him putting the milk bottle down on the step.