Archive for the ‘talk like a pirate day’ Category

Friday, September 18th, 2009

Arr! How LibraryThing went pirate

Talk Like A Pirate Day is over for us now. You can visit the translation at pir.librarything.com.

Chris and I decided to take pirate photos for our author pages. He’s pretty convincing, apart from the inflatable parrot.*

At 5 pm on Friday we jumped the gun on International Talk Like a Pirate Day, sending the whole site into Pirate-talk. (We’ll turn back off tomorrow evening, but click “Turn OFF pirate-speak” to turn it off sooner.)

“LibraryThing in Pirate” was a secret project of the Arr, me hearties! group. Members came up with all the translations. Some of my favorites are the little ones, like “enlarge” translated as “use yer spyglass”, the month January being translated as “January (me britches be cold)” and “Terms of Use” changed to “Rules o’ engagement.” Some like “Finger to the Wind” (for Zeitgeist) take some thought, but it would take a genius to discern that “Wi’ naw halp fram ‘ny matey”—is that Glaswegian?—means “Automatic.”

Arr, me hearties! was composed of volunteers from the Beta Group who spent the last week going string by string through LibraryThing’s interface, using the same code we use for our non-English sites. We ended up translating some 2,400 bits and pieces, about 44.2% of the site, making it only the 19th most-translated language, just above Albanian. (That sheds some light on how much effort has gone into the near-complete Portuguese, Dutch, French, Catalan and other translations!)

Top translators included readafew, rastaphrog, lorax, Carnophile, sqdancer, <ahttps://blog.librarything.com/wp-content/uploads/pirate/ href=”http://www.librarything.com/profile/conceptDawg”>conceptDawg and me.


For posterity’s sake, I took some screenshots:


*All LibraryThing employees were originally going to take photos of ourselves eating cake, in honor of LibraryThing’s fourth anniversary. (We’re in eight different cities, so we can’t just all eat cake together.) Anyway, Sonya had to miss the meeting where we cancelled this plan, and we forgot to tell her, so she dutifully sent her cake photo. Well, I hope she enjoyed the cake!

Labels: arr, chris, members, Sonya, talk like a pirate day

Wednesday, September 19th, 2007

Talk Like a Pirate Day. arrgh

Arrr, make me walk the plank, because I only just remembard that today’s a ‘ery important day. Aye, Talk Like a Pirate Day, o’ course. Ye’ll ne’er get me buried booty! (Luckily, I found a useful pirate-speak translator).

So let the fun begin with a couple of contests (as if the sheer glory of Talk Like a Pirate Day weren’t enough). This photo by Topper was last year’s winner of the Talk Like a Pirate Day bookpile contest, and we’re looking for this year’s! So, the first contest is a good old fashioned LibraryThing book pile contest.

Book pile contest: the rules

  1. Pile up your books. Be creative.
  2. Take a photo.
  3. Post the photo. You can do either of the following:
  4. Wait for us to crown a winner

the deadline: Wednesday, September 27th at noon EST (just over a week, so get cracking)

The second contest is a a haiku contest. One of the greatest things to come out of the launch of WikiThing (in my humble opinion) was the creation of help in the form of haiku. Started by tardis (a genius), LibraryThing Haikus now holds a place of honor on WikiThing, and has expanded to include not only Help, but also general LT haikus, and Library 2.0 haikus.

Haiku help contest: the rules

  1. Write a haiku. Or seven.
  2. Post them to the LibraryThing Haikus page on WikiThing.

the deadline: well, you can keep adding them forever, but we’ll pick a few winners at the end of the month.

Here’s a few for inspiration.

How to create
account? Put user name and password
in green box on home page
tardis

Can we have wishlists?
Yes, they are coming to us
with the winter winds…
readafew

All the books you’ve read,
an endless field of poppies;
Try UnSuggester!
Felius

Bonus points for combining haiku, LibraryThing help, and Talk Like a Pirate Day. Tim’s attempt (note he even respects the generic weather rule):

When autumn seas change
Scurvy dogs to lubbers, aye,
Get a blog widget.

PRIZES: Yes. There will be prizes, for both contests. Possibly in the form of buried treasure, possibly in the form of gift accounts.

Labels: book pile, contest, haiku, talk like a pirate day, wikithing