Keeping Warm / Зберігаючи тепло

I spent a little while translating some English labels - for goods destined for Ukraine - into Ukrainian. Of course, I mean copying the words into a translation engine and watching the magic happen. This is a great example of how the Internet enables things that would have been incomparably time-consuming even twenty years ago

The language is written using a Ukrainian variant of the Cyrillic script. This means that to my ignorant eyes it looks like words created by a random password generator. It is a Slavic language, meaning that, like English, it belongs to the Indo-European language group.

Given how alien it seems, I was a little surprised to discover this. I shouldn't have been; the root language from which all of those in this group derive was spoken 6000 years ago in the area just east of Ukraine. Its descendants are now spoken across two continents, including most of Europe, Russia, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Northern India (the existence of this family of related languages was first discovered by a servant of the Raj, translating Sanskrit legal texts into English)

The slippery nature of English means that translation by a computer is fraught with pitfalls. One label said 'fleece'.

Consider my day: it has been chilly and wet, every time I have been outside I have worn something warm. For lunch - Mrs M's brother's birthday - we visited a cafe in one of the affluent nearby villages; I paid £14 for poached eggs on toast. Tonight we are anticipating a significant frost, we have been around the garden putting a protective covering over tender plants. The last three sentences embed three different concepts covered by the word 'fleece', and we haven't been anywhere near sheep!

I solved the problem by copying Ukrainian words into Google and looking at pictures. I was still puzzled that the translation of 'fleece top' got me mostly pictures of women, but 'fleece jacket' was mostly men

The picture is a flue, not a fleece. We have the terrifying responsibility of keeping our neighbours' precious tomatoes and seedlings alive in their greenhouse until Saturday. This is a paraffin stove with a wick that can be wound up and down and a radiating flue to heat the space. I have never seen one of these before. Flying blind, without a fleece jacket