By: Charles Bowen A Web-based Translation Service From AltaVista
It all started when my cousin Kathy asked if I thought she ought
to tell her 14-year-old daughter to stop singing that old Patti
LaBelle song, "Lady Marmalade." In particular, my cousin was
concerned about the line that suggestively asks, "Voulez-vous
coucher avec moi ce soir?"
Of course, Kathy's child had heard Christina Aguilera's remake of
the 1974 LaBelle hit, recorded for the new movie, "Moulin Rouge."
Like many of us who were listening the first time that song came
around, the child found the tune enchanting. But, as the young
girl's mother asked me, is that sexy-sounding French question
really as naughty as we all were led to believe it was?
Well, I was flattered that Kathy thought I remembered any of my
college French. I don't. However, I do now have connections these
days when it comes to getting translations in a hurry.
AltaVisita's installation of the Babel Fish software is perhaps
the best known of a number of free translation services currently
on the World Wide Web. Babel Fish can convert the text
of French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Chinese, Korean and
Portuguese to and from English.
To use it, go to the site (http://world.altavista.com)
and enter or paste in the text you want translated. The feature
can translate up to 5K or about 800 words at a time, or the
equivalent of two standard, double-spaced pages.
Next, from the drop-down menu at the bottom of the screen, select
the conversion you wish, choosing from options ranging from
"English to Spanish" to "Chinese to English." After that, click
the Translate button and wait. In a moment, the site displays its
best shot at converting the text to the language you have chosen.
"Best shot" is important here. These are "machine translations,"
meaning they are, by necessity, quite literal in their approach.
Virtual translations obviously miss the nuances of a language and
never quite get the idioms. Nonetheless, they are remarkably good
at gleaning the gist of the message. Of course, the automatic
translator works best when the text to be converted uses proper
grammar. Slang, misspelled words, poorly placed punctuation and
run-on sentences give Babel Fish fits.
The site also can translate entire Web pages into a different
language. To do that, click the Website button on the
introductory screen. Enter the complete Web address (URL) of the
page to translate, including the preface, "http://". Next select
the language pair from the drop-down list (such as Spanish to
English) and click the Translate button. The feature can
translate individual Web pages up to 5K, and when you click a
link, the linked page is translated automatically as well.
A favorite use of Babel Fish among journalists is to translate
foreign newspapers online. And a new Web service by New Orleans
public relations expert Rick Perez can help there. His NewsTran
page (http://www.newstran.com)
automates the translation of newspapers around the world, from
Pravda in Moscow to the Beijing Daily.
Other considerations for using Babel Fish in your work:
o In typing in some text for translation (such as Russian), you
need a non-English keyboard. No problem. Click the World Keyboard
link at the right of the Translation display, then choose the
character set you need from the drop-down menu, selecting from
Russian, Portuguese, French, etc. You then can click the keys of
the screen's virtual keyboard. (Note that to enter some accents,
first click the accent, then the character that should appear
with it.)
o If you want to prevent a proper noun -- such as "Delta Queen"
-- from being translated, just type a period in front of each
word (as in .Delta .Queen).
o Finally, what about that name? What's the "translation" of the
name Babel Fish? It comes from the writing of the late, great
Douglas Adams. A Babel Fish was a universal translator in Adams'
classic sci-fi/humor book, "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy."
---
Bowen writes columns, articles and books from West Virginia, and is host of the daily Internet News syndicated radio show (http://www.netnewstoday.com).
charlesbowen@compuserve.com
Copyright 2001, Editor & Publisher
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