My friend Lin, a Chinese teacher at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem who runs the Chinese Garden, has been translating Chinese songs for her students for years. I have very fond memories of sitting in on her classes where all the students were KTVing together to some old Chinese folk songs. Lin’s quite good [...]

Thanks to Ran, the best Israeli blog in China, I heard of this odd news piece. Israeli YNet recently reported that one of my all-time least liked songs "Heat of Tel-Aviv" received a Chinese version.
Compare the Israeli version…

To the Chinese one…

Which one do you like more? Did you like the Shabbat/Hannuka candle effect in the [...]

There are some great translation tools out there but Lingoes is by far the most useful one that I’ve been using lately. Based on a concept similar to the pricy Israeli-based Babylon this software will translate any language to any language in any software you run on your PC, using three methods – either [...]

Every once in a while I have an Israeli asking me where that Tainan place is in Taiwan. Although most Israelis shouldn’t have trouble reading an English map, there is the occasional person asking me where Tainan is that isn’t able to read English very well, for example – in my last visit to Israel [...]

I’m not sure who did this and how, perhaps it’s mediated by English, but there are now a few online dictionaries that can translate between Hebrew and Chinese (מילון עברית סינית, מילון עברי-סיני). How odd, how wonderful.
(UPDATE 29/09/2008 : Google Translate now features full website translation from Chinese to Hebrew. Best tool ever.)
The first and [...]

While the other Israeli blogs on China are disappearing, it’s nice to find new ones. Naama and Zohar left to southern China and have been writing about their lives in a new Hebrew blog translated "Just like home, but completely different".
Here’s a quick translation from their introduction:

When we went to study Humanities, we didn’t [...]