Wikipedia:Reference desk archive/Language/2006 July 16

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Contents 1 Crickets Chirping 2 translation website 3 Band names, sports teams, etc -- plural or singular?

[edit] Crickets Chirping

In a number of political websites and blogs, I see the phrase "Crickets Chirping" often set off in parenthesis, brackets or quotes. Sometimes it will be phrased as "The Sound of Crickets Chirping" again with parenthesis, brackets or quotes. Can someone tell me the underlying meaning of the phrase and it's origin?

Thanks, George—The preceding unsigned comment was added by 72.178.168.133 (talk • contribs) .

It's like the sound of silence. You hear no laughing or other kind of reaction - just crickets chirping. --Chris S. 01:28, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

It occurs a lot in cartoons and some films for dramatic effect where a character says something and waits for a response, but all they hear is the sound of crickets chirping. A tumbleweed blowing down an empty street can also be used for similar situations. I am not sure where it originated from, but its use in films and cartoons is probably the most widely known. Road Wizard 01:37, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] translation website

Is there any website that can translate English into Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, Punjabi or Tamil? Please let me know beacuse I want to become a translator. Thank you.

The reason "beacuse [sic] I want to become a translator" doesn't make sense. If you want to become a translator, you have to speak the language, in which case you would have no use for a machine translation website. —Keenan Pepper 17:07, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

On the contrary, professional translators use machine translation websites all the time. We just don't leave the translations the way they are when they come out of the machine. When I'm translating a longish German sentence into English, it's much faster for me to do a machine translation first and then clean it up than it is to translate the whole thing "by hand". User:Angr 19:51, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Depends how good your machine translator is. Translating a text using Babelfish or a similar free tool beforehand doesn't save any time because the translation is so bad. It just increases the probability of overseeing a translation mistake it might.

I find Google translator to be quite good. Sometimes (not often) the translation doesn't even need any cleanup at all; often it needs only minor cleanup. User:Angr 15:03, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I have never seen any machine translator for Indian languages, sorry, and if there are any, particularly freely available on a website, they are probably crap. Machine translators have enough trouble translating similar languages. Junesun 14:11, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

I don't see why a translation into Hindi (or any other IE language) would be theoretically any more difficult than an English-Russian translation, which is provided by BabelFish. But I agree that they seem not to exist. Bhumiya (said/done) 14:58, 17 July 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Band names, sports teams, etc -- plural or singular?

Which is correct: "Pink Floyd are a band" or "Dream Theater is a band?" I have a hunch they're both correct because both are heavily used on wikipedia, but is the former a British style and the latter an American style? This is just my guess because I'm American and "Pink Floyd are a band" sounds really odd to me. I've just never heard this discussed before in comparisons of English dialects. --Loudsox 19:24, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

See American and British English differences#Singular and plural for nouns. Conscious 20:24, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for. --Loudsox 21:02, 16 July 2006 (UTC)

Pink Floyd was a band. Tesseran 06:02, 26 July 2006 (UTC)