By Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com
Reprinted with permission from Internet Search Advantage, ZD Journals. http://www.zdjournals.com
How to translate this article into French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, or German, Comment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.
Since the AltaVista Translation Assistant at http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com became available in December, information providers have been scrambling to find ways to take advantage of this new service to expand their reach to Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese, and German audiences.
Because the potential audience for any Web site is global, it often makes sense to provide your content in more than one language. Additional languages can help open new markets, both by making your content understandable to more people and also by showing respect for the culture and heritage of people in your target audience. Often readers who can understand English, but for whom English is a second language, will go out of their way to connect to text in their native tongue. And some Web sites are even required by law or by the charters of their organizations to provide all their content in more than one language. For instance, this is true of government sites in Canada and sites that support many organizations of the United Nations.
First, you need to make sure your pages are in a format that can be translated. If much of your content is plain text, you're in good shape. But if you're using sophisticated techniques that create pages dynamically on the fly, if you're using frames, or if the text is generated from databases or appears in Java applets, you've locked yourself out from taking full advantage of this new capability. Keep in mind that the same factors that lock your pages out from the automatic translation service also lock them out of the index of search engines like AltaVista. Hence, it might be worth your while to create plain text versions of your pages that will then be both translatable and findable by search engines.
If your pages have translatable text, you could use AltaVista to translate them and save the resulting pages. You could even translate large pages by repeatedly cutting and pasting chunks of text and assembling the pieces in polished pages at your site. Then you could offer visitors the choice of which language they'd like to see. But by so doing, you'd make yourself vulnerable to the vagaries of automatic translation, and a horrendous blunder caused by the inability of the software to understand a colloquial phrase might damage your company's reputation among the very people you're trying to open your site to. Also, in that case, you'd take on a significant maintenance burden--having to change your translated pages every time you change the originals; and additional overhead in terms of disk space and Web site complexity.
You also could create hyperlinks that take visitors to the AltaVista translation page with the URL for one of your pages already entered in the translation form (as I suggested in the April article "Keywords and Translation"). But the typical Web user would be mystified if suddenly transported to that translation page without some explanation. And the translation service will handle only a limited amount of text (about 5 KB when traffic is heavy), leaving the visitor with a Web page that's only partially translated.
Instead, I decided to post a clear and simple explanation of how users can take advantage of the translation service--that empowers them to get the translations they need, while leaving the responsibility in their hands. I then used the translation service to create versions of that document in French, German, Italian, and Portuguese. At the top of my home page (http://www.samizdat.com), I now have:
These phrases (with the appropriate accent marks, all captured and cut and pasted from the translation service) connect with hyperlinks to the matching documents. Over time, I plan to add those same words and links to all the pages where automatic translation would be helpful (not including, for instance, documents that consist of poetry and lists of titles of books). Here is the full text of that explanation, which you're welcome to use at your own site, if you wish:
To translate foreign language text, first connect to AltaVista search's automatic translation service. In a separate window, connect to the page you want to translate (a Web page, a word processing document, an email message, or a newsgroup item).
On the target page, click the left mouse button in the left margin beside the starting point in the text, and drag your cursor down over a couple of paragraphs (about a third of a typed page) to select them. Then, in the toolbar, click EDIT, then COPY to save the selected text to your Clipboard.
Next, bring up the translation page. Position your cursor over the translation form. Click the right mouse button and then PASTE. The selected text should now appear in the form. Below the form, click on the down arrow to select the language pair you want (such as English to French). Then click on TRANSLATE. The translated text should appear in a second or two.
To save the translated text in a file, click and drag (as above) to select the text; and click EDIT and COPY to place the text on your Clipboard. Then open a document in your word processor and paste the text. Return to the original document and select the next piece of text. Return to the translation page, click NEW TRANSLATION, paste the text in the new form, and proceed as before. Keep doing this as many times as necessary to translate and save the entire text.
The results should be useful, but they'll be far from perfect. (If you're reading this text in a language other than English, you can judge for yourself how good or bad it is.)
As you try these techniques, please let us know about your successes and your frustrations. Send us your tips, the creative approaches you've tried, and your questions. Let's share and learn from one another. You can reach me directly at seltzer@samizdat.com
Return to other related material at the B&R Samizdat Express home page
| Internet Business Showcase: | |||
|
|
|
|