A Small Encomium to Technology

One of the ways that we at Slaw stay in touch with our readers is through search engines’ reports on websites that refer to us. The fact that the internet has shrunk the world — or expanded my small part of it, which is the other way to look at it — continues to amaze me, as it did once again when I came across a reference to Slaw in a Bulgarian blog on media law, [Медийно право] [Нели Огнянова]. What caught their attention, I should mention, was the recent post by Dan Pinnington, The 2/3 Rule Will Make You a Happy and Successful Lawyer, or, in other words, Ключът към успешната и удовлетворяваща кариера на юриста се свързва с просто. It’s exciting enough to write knowing that strangers will read you, but it gives me a particular frisson to realize that some of those strangers will be in a culture sufficiently different that the effect of your words is really unpredictable.

How do I know the details of what I’ve just told you? After all, my Bulgarian is utterly absent. Again, technology is the answer: Google Translate, which provides an optional translation bar in the Chrome browser, helpfully informed me that the site I was viewing was written in Bulgarian — and did I want it translated into English? Just think about that. What would only a very few years ago have been an impenetrable barrier to our communication is now lowered, and in some cases swept away, by a freely available technology — and in this case for a language with only about 12 million speakers.

So I salute all helpful technology, our Bulgarian readers — Поздрави от Канада –, and as well our readers in the 177 other countries where, technology informs us, Slaw was visited last month.