Translator

[shawnkraus]

About a week ago I was introduced to Bable Fish which is a language translation program. It runs with Javascript so it is unable to be run here on Pbase at this time. I wrote to Pbase in hopes that they would allow something like this and Jehan suggested I post the idea here in the forums while he passed the idea to administrators.

My question to you the members of Pbase is what translators if any do you use and how easy are they to use in your opinion.

I would love to see some of the language barriers broken.

I am sure the world has alot to offer and many times it is in a different language than my own.

Anxiously waiting for your input.
--Shawn

[alangrant]

I've noticed in my Statcounter logs that quite a few visitors to my pages use Google Translate ( http://translate.google.com/ ) to view my photos. This doesn't require Javascript, you just have to enter a URL and it translates the page on the fly and displays it in a frame within the browser - the viewer can then click on any link within the page in the normal way and the page they jump to will also be translated. So once they have input the initial URL it's a very straightforward process.

I have no idea how Google Translate compares to Babel Fish or any other translator as I haven't used it myself.

Of course machine translation is a highly imperfect process. I've just looked at how Google translates some of my pages into Spanish (the only other language in which I can judge the results). A comment that included the phrase "high quality shots" (referring to photos) has been translated as "high quality vaccines"! Apart from that I thought it did OK, except that a lot of comments have spelling errors which not surprisingly trip it up.

[shawnkraus]

I should have clarified the Javascript issue as being able to embed it on my pages. The program uses javascript in its embed code not to run.

[dang]

Hi Shawn,
I posted about this awhile back, but had no response. Glad to see others are interested too, it would be a very helpful feature.
http://forum.pbase.com/viewtopic.php?f=7&t=38688&hilit=translator