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Sometime in the 1970’s Leonid Brezhnev,
leader of the Soviet Union arrived in London on an official state
visit. During dinner with the Queen of England, a young Russian
translator sat between Brezhnev and the Queen. Apparently the
young translator was somewhat intimidated by the lofty status
of the guests and was sitting quietly saying nothing. Brezhnev
encouraged him in Russian to join the conversation. He turned
to the queen and asked, “Do you speak English?” The
unfortunate young man was soon replaced with someone less prone
to social blunders. Every nation on the globe is recognizing the power and the impact of the Internet and the World-Wide-Web. English is the dominate language used on the Internet today, but are you aware that only nine percent of the people on earth speak English as their native language? If we want to use the global communication power of the World-Wide-Web we must build multi-lingual web sites. We need to be aware of the different cultural reaction to our graphics presentations as well as text. Do you know that what you might think of as a positive "thumbs-up" graphic could be interpreted in an Arab nation as an obscene gesture? What I know about languages other than my native English, you could put into a very small place. Oh yes, I took a French class in high school, and another in college, but I hated every minute of it. That’s why I was delighted to discover that Alta Vista has made a free translation service available on the web that goes beyond individual words. You’ve got to try this to believe it! Go to: (http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate?) This service is based on software from the French Company Systran. Babelfish can translate back and forth between English, French, German, Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. Other languages such as Japanese and Korean are reportedly in the works. You can type in a word, a sentence or a paragraph up to five hundred words and have it translated, in seconds! Or, you can key in a web address and it will bring up the page translated while keeping everything else in the original layout! Note that the name Babelfish comes from the tale, “A Hitchhikers Guide to the Universe.” So, now you have a running start on translating your web site into alternative languages. A software program will not replace the need for a human translator. But, it will allow you or your site visitors who know nothing of the alternate language, to get a clue and figure out the sense of what is being said. This past week I published a photo-essay about the Spokane Bloomsday 12-kilometer race on my web site. This was my chance to convert it into other languages. Go to: (http://www.murrayco.com/bloomsday98.html) Bablefish was used to convert this web page to French, German and Spanish versions. As a check to see how you are doing, you can use bablefish to translate the other language results back into English. This may be a somewhat unfair test, but you can see if the original sense of what was said was lost or retained. For example, the following sentence: “We think that the Internet will become the global marketplace of the twenty-first century, and we want you to know about our products and services.” was translated into French, and then translated back into English from the French. The result was: “We think that the Internet will become the total market of the twenty and unieme century, and we want that you know our products and services." The same sentence translated into German and then back to English, became: "We think that that becomes Internet the global market of the twenty-first century, and we require you in our products and services are versed." It sounds a bit clunky, but not bad for someone like me who is totally ignorant of German. The Spanish translation of the same sentence turned into: "We thought on that the Internet will becomes the global market of the twentieth first century, and we wanted that you knew to our products and the services." By translating back and forth you run mistakes both ways. Hey, don't try this on your high school Spanish teacher if you want a good grade. But still, here is opportunity to communicate in other languages and have a reasonably good chance of being understood. Best of all it's FREE! You can continue the idea and have great fun seeing what the software can translate effectively, and where it fails. Here is another web site that will bend your mind if you are into alternative language issues: Consult the Logos Dictionary. Go to (http://www.logos.it/query/query.htm) This freely-accessible database, compiled without any form of public contribution, is growing constantly because it's updated and corrected on-line by a network of professional translators. The dictionary currently has 7,580,560 entries (total for all languages). As an ongoing and interactive project the Logos Dictionary is inevitably prone to error and will never be complete, but with the contributions and corrections provided by the Internet, it is rapidly improving and expanding. This database cost Logos about a million dollars. So, why are they giving it away for free? Company spokesmen say that they did it for their translators, so it doesn't cost them any more to open it up to web users. The people at Logos didn't stop there. Take a look at this wonderful site that is also freely available on the Internet: Go to (http://www.logos.it/literature/literature.html) It's the Logos context search facility Wordtheque. Wordtheque is a powerful interface with a massive database (currently 254,031,176 words) containing multilingual novels, technical literature and translated texts. Using Wordtheque you can read your word in the context in which it is found in multiple usage. For example, how do you translate the word "culture" unless you know if you are in the context of a humanist or a biologist? Hits are highlighted in context windows that can be expanded up or down. To go to the source web pages (novels, etc.) click on the title. This site can be extremely helpful to you in your work with any of the many languages. Try a somewhat obscure word in English such as impresario, and see what results. This is a useful tool for any student or writer. J'espère que vous avez trouvé cette information utile. Mein Ziel ist, Ihnen Internet-Informationen zu geben, die jeder Monat nützlich ist. Sea seguro controlar la aplicación de julio el compartimiento de ComputorLink. Es una fuente valiosa de la información libre! --Will Murray |
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