Dell executive Bob Pearson decided to comment on Apple's "green" ad campaign. It was hard to understand. We were confused. Fortunately, Robert was nice enough to translate. The original post, on Dell's site, is here.

"Several Dell folks were surprised and perplexed to see Apple's new 'green' MacBook ad since its release last month and we've been watching the discussions in the blogosphere. After chatting with our environmental teams about the topic, we realized that instead of ignoring it, we should have a conversation about the real meaning of being green from the viewpoint of a Fortune 500 company."

In a desperate attempt to dredge up this environment issue from October, I bought lunch for a few of my subordinates, ordered them to be in the "Sunset Plains" conference room at noon, and told them we would be discussing this.

"Our view is that companies who choose to lead have an obligation to be open and transparent. We have a responsibility to engage in dialogue about the environment, whether we agree or disagree with an individual person or group. It all contributes to the greater good."

We like to sit around and shoot the breeze about stuff. When there isn't enough breeze-shooting, we shoot it ourselves, con-sarn it.

"What is not good is to skip steps, avoid dialogue and pray that people aren't smart enough to figure it out. That doesn't help any of us and it certainly doesn't further the environmental cause for those of us who care deeply about it."

Honestly, talking is the only thing we do well.

Thanks to what appears to be a character encoding problem on a French version of the Apple website, the MacBook announcement -- meant to say "perfectly designed" in French -- came out reading "perfectly dumb" (or as one of our tipsters said, a more vulgar version of "perfectly poopy").

That wasn't the only problem: according to Macenstein, a Macgeneration article noted that the announcements were replete with spelling and grammatical errors. (Link is en français.)

The pages have since been updated with better grammar.

Unfortunately my decade-old high school French can't tell me what about the grammar is wrong, but hopefully our commenters can let us know by leaving a comment.

Thanks, Bertie and Fabrizio!

The other week, we posted about Jisho, a Japanese to English translator for the Mac, and James, the developer, sent us another notice today that he's since updated to version 2.1.1. I can't find a changelist anywhere (and the site still says version 2.1) but James says there's a new intro splash screen, and an enhanced interface and accuracy. So if you grabbed it when we mentioned it last week, make sure to get the upgrade as well.

He wants to personally thank you, the readers of TUAW, for helping him make his software better, and we must echo his sentiments-- you guys rock. We are nothing but proud to bring developers like James a great audience like you, thanks very much.

I've watched as much anime as the next guy, but even I need a Japanese dictionary to figure out what those crazy robots are saying sometimes. Enter Jisho, a Japanese/English dictionary for Mac OS X 10.4 and higher. You can search in the Kanji, Hiragana, and Katakana forms of Japanese, and also in English, German, Russian, and French, and it will translate not only the Japanese characters out for you (in a bright, clean interface), but the Romanization as well.

And the latest version features a completely rewritten Romanization engine, as well as Kanji "zooming" and more OS X integration. If you ever need to regularly go from English to Japanese (or back again), Jisho's got what you need-- it's just $15 from Sugoisoft. And maybe you'll pick up enough to actually learn the language.