[Web4lib] Babelfish translator

[Petter Næss]

I fully agree that the quality of machine translation - whether Google or
Babelfish - is mostly for laughs, and if you wanted to do a proper
translation you'd be far better off starting from scratch than using the
usually preposterous/hilarious machine-translations. 

Nonetheless, it's possible that someone who speaks very little English might
gain a slightly better understanding of a text - or at least get a better
idea of what the text or website is about - by using one of these
translators. 

I've had some enlightening exchanges with non-English speaker relying
entirely on machine-translated email - it lends a charming and whimsical
quality to the conversation, even when much is unintelligible! Machine
translations can also be useful for librarians who are trying to find
foreign language reports/documents for clients - sometimes all you need is a
translation of a title. As to how useful this service is at ircworld,
probably not very - not many people visit the site, and I use it as a
platform to try out new stuff...

Petter Næss
Information Resource Director
U.S.Embassy, Public Affairs
Henrik Ibsens gate 48
0244 Oslo
Norway
phone (47) 21308802
fax (47) 22440436
pnaess at usa.no
http://www.usa.no
http://ircworld.blogspot.com  

-----Original Message-----
From: Tomas Baiget [mailto:baiget at sarenet.es] 
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 11:45 AM
To: Petter Næss; 'Bruce Brigell'; Web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: Re: [Web4lib] Babelfish translator

The Google's translation (used by ircworld) is as bad as Babelfish.
For the couple Spanish-English or viceversa the results are totally
unuseful. You lost much more time trying to correct the silly 
results than translating the text manually.

Tomàs Baiget
"El Profesional de la Información"
http://www.elprofesionaldelainformacion.com
Barcelona

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Petter Næss" <pnaess at usa.no>
To: "'Bruce Brigell'" <BBrigell at skokielibrary.info>;
<Web4lib at webjunction.org>
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 11:01 AM
Subject: RE: [Web4lib] Babelfish translator


I'm doing this at ircworld.blogspot.com - see near top of the page.

Petter Næss
Information Resource Director
U.S.Embassy, Public Affairs
Henrik Ibsens gate 48
0244 Oslo
Norway
phone (47) 21308802
fax (47) 22440436
pnaess at usa.no
http://www.usa.no
http://ircworld.blogspot.com

-----Original Message-----
From: web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org
[mailto:web4lib-bounces at webjunction.org] On Behalf Of Bruce Brigell
Sent: Thursday, December 07, 2006 12:15 AM
To: Web4lib at webjunction.org
Subject: [Web4lib] Babelfish translator

Is anyone using Babelfish from Yahoo/Altavista to provide a rough
translation of pages on a Library Website? I know the translations are
often laughable, but I have used it to get the sense of pages in
languages other than English.

We are seeking a low cost method to provide some assistance to those in
our community who speak languages other than English.

Bruce Brigell
Coordinator of Information Services
Skokie Public Library
5215 Oakton St.
Skokie, IL 60077
847/324-3142
847/673-7797 [fax]
bbrigell at skokielibrary.info
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