What do Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Machiavelli, Tasso, Luther, Ibsen,
and Goethe have in common? They are all on the same World
Literature CD with over 600 books, in plain text, with software
that lets you listen as well as read.
AltaVista recently increased the range of language pairs it handles
with its free automatic translation service, and at the same time made
the service far easier to use.
Now you can translate from Russian to English (in addition to from
Italian, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese to English), and you can
also go from French to German and German to French.
At the same time they added a "world keyboard". Just click on the keyboard icon, and a virtual keyboard appears in a Java window and you get a new, associated translation form. The keyboard has a dropdown menu of language choices: world (English characters plus a few special characters and accented letters used in other European languages), English (useful for people whose keyboard are set already in non-English languages), French (for translating French to English and French to German), German (for German to English and German to French), Spanish (for Spanish to English), Italian (for Italian to English), Portuguese (for Portugese to English), and Russian (for Russian to English). When you select a language, the characters on the keyboard change accordingly. Then you can type in the translation box by clicking on the keys of the virtual keyboard or by hitting the equivalent keys on your real keyboard; either way the charcter you see in the translation box will be a character from the language you have chosen.
This innovation makes it much easier to enter foreign text for translation. In the past, you had to have your PC's keyboard set to enter characters from that language, or had to cut and paste into the translation box text that already had the appropriate non-English characters, or you had to enter English "equivalents" of foreign characters, which sometimes led to ambiguity or confusion.
Unfortunately, the words that you type with the virtual keyboard are only of use in that search box. This is a Java application which makes it impossible to copy and paste the text from the box to anywhere else. (This is unlike the main Babel translation page, where you can copy text -- complete with accents and non-English characters from the results box to any other document on your PC.)
In addition, the translation boxes on the main Babelfish page are now much clearer and easier to use. There is a small box at the bottom where you can enter a URL, to see the translation of the first 5K (about 800 words or two doublespaced typed pages) of any Web page. Above that is a large box in which you can type or paste any text that you want translated.
When you request a translation, a new window opens with the results box on top. Directly below that is a button labelled "Search the Web with these results." That setup makes it easy for you to translate a word or phrase, and then search the Web for those foreign words. For instance, you might be interested in mentions of cockroaches in Spanish language Web pages. You enter "cockroach", get the Spanish word "cucaracha", click on Search the Web, and get 1600 matching pages.
When you see the list of search results, each item then has an associated "Translate" link. Click on that, and you see the translation of the target page (using the translation pair you original chose -- in this case Spanish to English), with all the graphics and page layout just as it was in the original. You also see at the top of the screen the choices: World Home and View Original Language. Click on View Original Language and a second browser window opens up, so you can see the original page and the translated page side by side for comparison.
Click on World Home, and you arrive at a page where all of AltaVista's language and country-specific features are readily available to you. There's a regular simple search box, with its pull-down menu of languages you'd like to search in (a much wider selection that the languages available for translation, including Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hungarian, Icelandic, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish).
You also see a selection of country-specific AltaVista search sites, where the search site itself is written in the local language, the content is tailored for the needs of a local audience, and the server is located in the target country for fast response time -- Australia, Denmark, France, Germany, India, Italy, Netherlands, Sweden, and United Kingdom. And, of course, you see the Babelfish translation boxes, with the choice of World Keyboard.
Related article: Making your site global -- taking advantage of free translation at AltaVista
Can we help you build an Internet business? Richard Seltzer is an independent Internet writer/speaker/consultant. Click here for details. or send email to seltzer@samizdat.com
This site is Published by B&R Samizdat Express, 33 Gould St., West Roxbury, MA 02132. (617) 469-2269. seltzer@samizdat.com
What do Balzac, Dumas, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Machiavelli, Tasso, Luther, Ibsen,
and Goethe have in common? They are all on the same World
Literature CD with over 600 books, in plain text, with software
that lets you listen as well as read.
My
Internet: a Personal View of Internet Business Opportunities
by Richard Seltzer, on CD, includes four books, 162 articles, and 49 newsletter
issues that will inspire you and provide the practical information you
need to build your own personal Web site or Internet-based business, helping
you to become a player in this new business environment.
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