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!