Dear LPG,

I wonder how many LPG readers would agree that lockdown has made us into much lazier pensioners than we have ever been. People will always agree that we have earned the right to slow down, but until we older people of the world were forced to stay at home, I bet we all did so much more. It has had a knock-on effect too, because the fact that we have no need to be ready for whatever appointments we used to have on our calendars, it has given us the perfect excuse to have no real reason to even get out of bed on time anymore. The saddest thing about it all is that we know what the year has done to us and I know that I feel quite guilty as a result.  

When I finally get up these days, I often spend a bit of time on my computer in the mornings and I read an article on your pages recently which caught my eye because it was about this very subject.  GG found a National celebration that gave us permission to be lazy for a whole week (►►►).   But that was not what I really wanted to say today.

In her article she mentioned a Frenchman named David d' Équainville and I was surprised that the links at the bottom of the post did not include a bit about him, so I set about using the powers of Google to find out a bit more. I put his name in the Google search bar and then I realised why he was not mentioned. All the information that I could find about him was written in French, a language I have been meaning to learn properly since I was forced to study the basics in school a long time ago.

I was disappointed, but then a friend told me a little secret and that is that Google translates. I always knew that, but I never knew how easy it was to get it to do that, so now that I know I would like to pass the secret on. There are many more complicated ways of doing it and I suppose it depends on your computer, but all you have to do is right-click at the top of the foreign web page and then left-click on ‘translate to English’ in the box that appears if you are using Google Chrome.

I know I do it the lazy way and sometimes we laugh at the results of what is translated, but since working out how Google can help, I am able to write letters to my son’s French mother-in-law and we have a lot more in common than I ever realised when she visited England and we struggled to communicate with each other.

That’s something that has given us two a bit more to get up for in the mornings!

TF, Lee

Just in case you have nothing else to translate, TF has found the web page mentioned above...

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… and LPG has found a few other bits of information about getting your computer to translate things for you…

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