By Richard Seltzer, seltzer@samizdat.com, www.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 GermanComment traduire en français, Cómo traducir a los españoles, Come tradurre in italiano, Como traduzir em portuguêses, Wie man in Deutschen übersetzt.
The "beta" wallpaper has now gone away, but the AltaVista Search site is continually improving its new translation service--which translates English to French, German, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, and vice versa--now known as the AltaVista Translation Assistant. Don't be surprised by changes in the look and feel. As AltaVista gathers data about usage (from tens of millions of hits) and gleans good suggestions from an enormous volume of user suggestions, it's making changes. You can now access the service by going to the Translation Assistant (Babelfish) page at
http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com
or by clicking the Translations tab, which now appears above the query form in both Simple and Advanced Search.
Accessing the Babelfish page is simple, just click the Translate link to the right of a search result. The Babelfish page will automatically display the URL of the page you want to translate, as shown in Figure A. Click the down arrow next to Translate From and select a language pair. Then click Translate. You'll then see the Web page you selected in the target language you chose. The formatting (including graphics) will be the same as what you'd normally see at that page, but the Translation Assistant will translate the words that appear in plain text (as opposed to buried in Java applets or graphic images). Also, all the hyperlinks will be in place with their associated words translated. When you click any of these hyperlinks, you'll return to the AltaVista translation page with the new URL already entered in the form. To go to that new page and have it automatically translated, just click Translate. If the target page isn't in the language you thought it was, you'll see the page in its original language. You might translate a page from French to English, then click on a hyperlink in the translated page, and ask for a translation of that page from French to English, when in fact the original language of the new page is English. In that case, AltaVista ignores the translation command, and you see the page in the original English. That means you can click any of those links and continue to navigate the Web as you normally do.
You can also go straight to the translation page (by entering the URL or clicking the tab), type a URL, select a language, and click Translate. Note that you can enter the URL for any publicly accessible Web page, regardless of whether AltaVista has indexed that page.
Finally, the translation page lets you translate strings of text. Just go straight to the translation page, type or copy and paste any text in a language that the service handles, and click Translate.
The methods of accessing this service make it very handy for a wide variety of uses, such as Web research, email, and participation in newsgroups, forums, and chat. In this article, we'll discuss Web research, and we'll discuss other applications in subsequent articles.
The foreign language content on the Web is growing at a rapid rate, making this service ever more useful when you're navigating the Web for research purposes and don't want to miss important information simply because you don't understand the language it's written in. Under normal circumstances, the pages in your results list are very likely to be in the same language as the language you used in your query. And you're likely to remain blissfully ignorant that additional pages actually exist but are written in other languages. In other words, if you search for English words and phrases, you'll get only pointers to pages written in English (unless the information provider is particularly savvy and has included translations of keywords and phrases in the text of a page or in a keyword meta tag, as discussed in last month's issue). But sometimes, the same word is used in more than one language. (This is particularly common with technical words.) And sometimes you're looking for a company name or trade name that remains constant across languages.
You also might want to target foreign language pages. Perhaps you know enough of the target language to, with the help of a dictionary, come up with the right words and phrases to enter your query in that other language. But in that case, you're likely to run into the limitations of your PC in representing the characters of that foreign language, as shown in Figure B. If you're like most of us, you can't easily enter the special accent marks needed for French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese. Fortunately, the type-it-in mode in the AltaVista Translation Assistant can solve both those problems.
After you've submitted your query in your native language and gleaned all the relevant research results, open a second browser window--one for the AltaVista query form (either Simple or Advanced Search) and one for the AltaVista translation page. Enter the first word or phrase in your query in the translation form, select a target language, and click Translate. Then copy and paste the translated word or phrase--complete with all the right accents--into the query box. Do that for each and every separate word or phrase in your query, entering all the necessary query punctuation (+), special commands (such as, anchor:), and, in Advanced Search, operators (AND). Then submit your query. Do that for each language you feel is likely to be important for your research.
Remember that every query submitted to AltaVista generates a unique URL. That means if you're working on a continuing research project and you're likely to want to resubmit the same query in the future, you can bookmark the results page. Then, whenever you want, you can click that bookmark and thereby launch that exact query, generating fresh results. If these translated queries you're constructing could be useful to you or your colleagues in the future, bookmark them, so you don't have to repeat all this work.
When using the AltaVista Translation Assistant, keep in mind the limitations of machine translation. If the material you want to translate is poetry or highly colloquial, or laden with technical jargon, the results are likely to be disappointing (and might turn out to be humorous). But for news and business communications--straightforward, grammatical, correctly spelled text--the translations tend to be very good.
Also, keep in mind there's a limit to the size of text that AltaVista will translate. This length is variable. It now seems to range from a minimum of about 5 KB (about the size of the text at the average Web page) to a maximum of about 20 KB. The AltaVista folks are trying to balance usage for maximum benefit to the widest possible audience; so the length is likely to vary based on demand at the time you happen to connect and as they, over time, further adjust the underlying algorithms.
That means if the page you want translated happens to have lots of text, you will at some point see ***TRANSLATION ENDS HERE***; and after that point, you'll see the continuation in the original language. Because of the demand factor, those words might appear at a different place in the text the next time you try to translate the same page.
If you need more of that particular page translated, copy the additional text with your browser and then click ***TRANSLATION ENDS HERE***, a hyperlink that takes you back to the Translation Assistant page, with the form blank. Then paste the new text into the form. You can do this in a variety of ways. First, place your cursor in the Translate text box. Then right-click with your mouse and click Paste; or, with Navigator, click Edit and click Paste. Then click Translate. Next you'll see the translated text (plain text, without the formatting and the graphics of the original Web page), followed by the original text you submitted. (Note: The same length limitations apply in this mode as when you submit a URL for translation.)
If the document is particularly long, you might have to go through this process many times to translate the whole thing. In that case, you might want to run two or more browsers. Keep the translation form page (babelfish) in one browser window, and the Web page you're translating in the other browser window. Then you can easily move each chunk to the translation form, without losing track of where you are in the text. (To clear the form for your new text, click New Translation.)
If you'd like to keep a complete copy of the translation so you can print, edit, and/or reread it in its entirety, open your word processor, create a new document, and copy and paste each successive chunk of translated text into that document.
If the page has frames, you'll see the message:
Frame Error--The page you requested is composed of frames. We don't at present translate a framed document as it's likely to take longer to download than your patience will allow. Below is the list of pages this frame is composed of. We'll translate individual sub pages of a frame (if they aren't frames of course).
Then try the suggested sub pages. But if that doesn't work, or if the problem is different such as a Java applet, highlight and copy the target text and paste it into the AltaVista translation form. Note that the copy-and-paste technique won't work for text that's embedded in graphics. In that instance, the copy function on your PC and in your browser won't recognize there's any text on the page you could copy.
If you submit for translation a URL that's behind a firewall or on the other side of a password-protected registration page, AltaVista won't be able to fetch and translate the text. But if you're authorized to access that page, you can open it in one browser window and copy and paste the text from there into the AltaVista translation form in another browser window.
The translation page lets you translate strings of text. Just go straight to the translation page, type or copy and paste any text in a language that the service handles, and click Translate.
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 the author directly at seltzer@samizdat.com
Go to Richard Seltzer's AltaVista Search tutorial
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