How to translate into French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean from English and from those languages (and Russian) into English


Go to AltaVista's Babelfish automatic translation page. http://babelfish.altavista.com

If you are interested in translating a small piece of text that doesn't include accent marks, you can simply type those words directly into their form, select the language pair you are interested in (e.g., Russian to English), and click on Translate.

Otherwise, in a separate window, open the page you want to translate (for instance, a Web page, a word processing document, an email message, or a newsgroup item). Click the left mouse button in the left margin beside the starting point in the text, and drag your cursor down over a couple paragraphs (about a third of a typed page). That will select those paragraphs. Then, in the toolbar, click "EDIT", then "COPY" to save the selected text in your Clipboard.

Next, position your cursor over the translation form on this page or at babelfish.altavista.com. 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 on "EDIT" and "COPY" to put it in your Clipboard. Then open a document in your word processor and paste the text there.

Go back to the target original and select the next piece of text. Go back to the translation page, click on "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 will be far from perfect. (If you are reading this text in a language other than English, you can judge for yourself how good or bad it is.) 


Update: Jan. 2001. AltaVista just added English to Japanese, Korean, and Chinese, and also Japanese, Korean, and Chinese to English. Apparently (at least with the settings on my PC), you can't copy and paste Japanese, Korean, and Chinese text into the translation box. But you can paste English into the box to translate into those languages. And you can enter the URL of a Web page in one of those languages to get an English translation. (Given my level of ignorance of Asian languages, when I stumble upon or am pointed to a site with unfamiliar characters, I connect to Babelfish, enter the URL and test to see if it is Japanese, Chinese, or Korean).



Related article: Expanded translation capabilities at AltaVista's Babelfish site
Related article: Making your site global -- taking advantage of free translation at AltaVista

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