Y los pensamientos dieron vuelta de nuevo a Barcelona...
Et les pensées ont tourné de nouveau à Barcelone...
Und Gedanken drehten sich zurück zu Barcelona...
En gedachten die terug naar Barcelona worden gedraaid...
Ed i pensieri hanno girato di nuovo a Barcellona...
The Sagrada Familia construction site in Barcelona offers you beautiful views of the best Europe has to offer in contemporary scaffolding, safety barriers, harmonic machine noise and masterpieces-in-progress for the union-approved capital renovation and maintenance rate of 8 Euros. In the basement museum, visitors are invited to learn more about the long history and slow implementation of the building's construction, figure out what parts of the building were in fact constructed while lunartist Gaudi was alive, watch real-live restoration-engineers craft plaster models of building parts that don't now -- and may never -- exist, and learn about how to make donations to ensure construction in perpetuity.Also in the basement, the attraction features a non-functioning, wall-mounted and coin-operated sound guide, precursor to the contemporary, and now conveniently mobile, audio guide. If working, the "Guia Turistica Sonora" might have provided visitors insight into one of the exhibits located closest to the apparatus in one of 7 European languages.
* Demostración: cómo funcionar el aparato turístico / Démonstration : comment se fonctionne l'appareil touristique / Demonstration: wie man den touristischen Apparat laufen läßt / Demonstration: how to operate the touristic apparatus / Demonstratie: hoe te om de toeristische apparaten in werking te stellen / Dimostrazione: come fare funzionare l'apparecchio turistico.*Nuestras apologías, versión catalana inasequible en este tiempo
Really, I wonder if this machine ever worked. What did it say? How long was the message? Did it previously accept pesetas, and was it updated in 2002 to accept Euro coins? (It doesn't look post-2002 to me.) What length of message, or informational nugget, constitutes "good value" for pocket change? Were the original messages recorded by native speakers of each of the 7 languages, or read out syllable by frightening robotic syllable by grating mid-'80s computer voices? What, if any, language was considered for insertion into the empty 8th slot? Is the apparatus temporarily out of order because its clunky recordings are soon to be updated with state-o'-the-art machine translation software?In celebration of the new translation tech, as well as the semantic and pragmatic impediments that will forever plague it, and with a respectful tip-o'-the-hat to oddball playback devices and "translation" machines of past and present, I hereby add a translation feature to this page. The Babelfish buttons translate the page immediately, though only into one of those 8. The other flags lead to Google Translation, which offers more tongue-swapping combos (including English to Russian), but needs the URL to be pasted in.
