Lack of Window Gazing Foils Weather Report

What can I say about Stolly's that hasen't already been said?.

Multilingual Metropole?

by Ric Erickson

Paris:- Monday, 19. January 1998:- I don't think we had any big storms last week; not like the violent ones on the coasts a few weeks ago that I forgot to mention. There was a local tornado around the Calais area - one that had drifted across the Channel from Hastings after wrecking things there - but the worst I had was a puny ten-minute downpour last Wednesday.

I might moan about the weather a bit more if it was cold. It is, in fact, unseasonably warm - probably about five degrees more than normal during the daytime, although the weather people will insist it is only one-tenth of a degree; averaged, no doubt, over the past 548 years.

Metropole readers had a bit to say about my shoddy coverage last week of the 100th anniversary of the publication of Emile Zola's 'J'Accuse...!' in the Aurore. Some of their comments are in this issue.

I looked around the Web a bit to see if I could find more information about the wartime deportations from France and learned that there is a serious industry involved with historical facts involving the Holocaust. Scholars are worried about phoney histories, because these may give fuel to the lunatics who insist it never happened.

You might shrug your shoulders when someone like Jean-Marie Le Pen declares that the Holocaust was a 'mere detail' of the entire history of the Second World War. But if you visit Paris' Memorial for the Deportees and read that 200,000 French residents were shipped east to the death camps, then it doesn't seem like a 'mere detail.'

Just try thinking about your own government 'deporting' you to such a fate, and you'll begin to understand why Mr. Le Pen has been busted twice already for his little comment, and is facing appearances at additional courts, on the same charges.

Meanwhile, other Metropole readers like the magazine so much that they move to France so they can have it 24 hours a day and live instead of virtual.

I think this may be a bit extreme, but all the same I took a bit of time off last Wednesday to meet a nice young lady from Atlanta. After several months, she is getting by a little bit better. She may do some contributing to Metropole, so I will save her name until she wants to go public with a 'byline.'

The other major event of the week was the wobbly launch of a very serious 'missing person' investigation by Metropole's 'Investigative Reporter' department.

It is by no means certain this search will have a successful result, and even if it fails, it will make a highly unusual report. I'm counting on it to be 'the story of the year' - it's only January too - so keep hitting Metropole's bookmark every week until it shows up.

There are probably one or two readers who would prefer to read Metropole in French, German, Spanish or Portuguese and I would prefer it if these languages were a regular feature of the magazine. For the time being, this cannot be.

However, Digital's search site ' AltaVista ' now has a new feature. If you do a search for 'Metropole Paris' you will see that AltaVista will display quite a few recent columns and features. Near the end of each listing you will see the word 'Translate.'

When you hit it, a window appears, containing the Web address of the referenced Metropole page; and underneath the window there is a 'pull-down menu' which allows you to choose which language you wish. You pick one, and then you can read Metropole - in its usual page-layout, with photos - in any one of several languages.

You can also put any Web address you want into the text area of the window, choose the language, and the page will be translated in a couple of seconds - if the text isn't too long. Actually, you can put any text into the window and it will be translated. Translations are also possible from various languages into English.

As the translations are done by robots and software, they are not perfect - but they will do. Some quite funny results may turn up when they go to work on some of the words I occasionally invent.

Besides being a part of the AltaVista search service, Digital also has astand-alone service where you can try out any texts you have. A company named Systran is responsible for the software, and offers it in a variety of language pairs.