A problem with having an international g/f is that her parents can’t speak english.
She was chatting her parents on MSN and i decided that I would have a go and see how the google translator holds up
(yes there is the older Altavista babel-fish, but I had trouble with it not being able to translate a LOT of words)

I could easily translate what her mother said to me into English. However, I was very affraid that what I would translate into Chinese for her would turn out very wrong. So i got into the habit of translating English into Chinese. Copying the translated chinese, and pasting it back into Google translate to translate it BACK into english. While this isn’t foolproof, I figured it would at least offer some additional security that I don’t accidentally call her mother a 3-eyed fish.

The problem with this approach is that it is VERY time consuming, if the translation wasn’t great, I would have to repeat the process using less ambiguous words which could take many cycles. I decided to see if I could create an application that could do this for me, unfortunately the Google api doesn’t expose the translation service yet.
However I found a ‘hack’ to do a HTML scrape and pull the results out
http://blogs.msdn.com/shahpiyush/archive/2007/06/09/3188246.aspx
now I’ve got a simple WPF app that can quickly translate, and show me the translation back so i can quickly tweak what I say to her mother.
I’ve only had one or two “huh, what you said makes no sense” moments

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My girlfriend is from Shanghai and loves to use her chinese apps:
QQ, popkart, some online DDR ripoff.

The only problem is that when we run the setup, or once in the app, all the characters are really strange, random circles and squiggles, not Chinese characters at all.
The solution thanks to
http://www.vistax64.com/vista-general/80694-chinese-application-not-showing-chinese-characters.html
is to change the system locale to Chinese.

You do this by going:
Control panel, regional settings.
Administrative tab
then the “Change system Locale” button. Change it to the appropriate setting (i chose Chinese PRC)

I’ve had no problems with my system after running like this for the last 2 months. All my games and applications still work fine and are displayed in english, but it is now able to display the correct chinese characters when requested.
(the only problem i have had are with Nvidia and intel driver installs, they detect the langauge setting and display the setup apps in chinese instead of English

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