My wife recently returned from a trip to Amman, Jordan. While she was there, she took the opportunity to pick up some local sweets to bring back and share.
They were very flowery and tasted a little like cologne smells. 🙂 The package the candy was in had a label. It was entirely in Arabic. Since neither of us can read Arabic, we were not quite sure what these were called. 1 Google Translate to the rescue!
Great, “(Fragrant comfort)”. Well, that sounds – and tastes – about right. But it doesn’t quite feel like a solid translation. The Google Translate app is pretty amazing. Almost all text was identified. I used my finger to highlight just a portion.
But wait, Google Translate gives you text you can copy.
“(Fragrant comfort)” reads as ( راحة معطرة )
I punched that Arabic word into Google and saw some familiar photos. I was on the right path!
But Google still didn’t tell me what this candy was called. All the results were in Arabic! But look! Toward the end of the search results on the first page. A link to the Arabic Wikipedia entry for راحة الحلقوم
https://ar.wikipedia.org/wiki/راحة_الحلقوم
That’s it, but I still don’t know what they are called.
From the Wikipedia article – from nearly any Wikipedia article – I can see there are articles about the subject in other languages, including English.
Where does that take you?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_delight
So in the span of a few minutes I was able to quickly translate a language I do not speak into a text I could copy (perfectly I might add) and search, and using the interconnectedness of Wikipedia was able to find out what the candy is called in the language I’m most familiar with.
The future is pretty sweet.