Recently, I tried to put 50 Shekels (9GBPish, this PC doesnt have pound symbol 🙂 worth of credit on my mobile phone.   This is hard in itself, Cellcom’s web site is of course in Hebrew and has options to view this site in Arabic or Russian but not English.

Every now and then Cellcom send me a text with some offers, but it appears in funny squares as my handset doesn’t have Hebrew support, although I have seen my Motorola V8 phone sold here on Orange IL.

Google translater is an absolute boon.   Not only does it do Hebrew, Arabic, Russian, Chinese, Japanese, and all European languages with Latin type alphabets, a recent update means it does Welsh, Afrikaans and Icelandic, total of 51 tongues.

I decided to be a bit ambitious and register on Cellcom’s site to buy credit online by opening up Firefox with several tabs for Cellcom’s site and google translator.   Well it nearly worked, I can convert whole URLs or paragraphs and it kind of makes sense, and I have to enter my first name in English and in Hebrew, Jonathan > Yonatan > יונתן

On the next page I have to enter something called an “A” number.   My understanding is this is something like a National insurance or social security number, and leaving it blank or entering something dumb like 123456 didn’t work.   So when I get credit from my phone I have to buy a paper voucher and rely on a friend to key it in with Hebrew spoken automated system.   Oh well.