BabelFish
by Roger Barnette
We Americans take for granted that as
the originator of the World Wide Web,
that we are entitled to everything
being in English. Not so!
The airlines use English as an international
language due to safety, but otherwise,
we need to be aware that there is an entire
World implied by the WWW acronym.
The web crawler, Altavista developed a
really effective solution that is not
very well publicized, but is amazing
to see in operation.
It is called BabelFish, after the translation
creature from Douglas Adam's book,
"Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy."
http://babelfish.altavista.com
In the book, characters couldn't understand
other galactic languages until this little
fish was placed in their ear to whisper the
translations to them.
In practice, the website works in two ways.
The first is straight translation.
I type in "My name is Roger." and select
translate from English to French and click
the "Translate" button, and the website
replies with, "Mon nom est Roger." Cool, no?
The second is even more amazing, it can convert
entire websites and maintain the translation
as you click through the site. It is absolutely
as if a little fish redrew the webpage for you.
To try it out, enter a website. We used ours,
"http://www.bardic.com" And converted it to
German. And Voila! My welcome message of
"Welcome to our website!" becomes
"Willkommen zu unserem website!"
I can't promise you will need this often, but
the first time you encounter that website that
you really needed and it was authored in
Russian, you will really appreciate the option
so see what that strange website really says.
Auf Wiedersehen!
(2002-10-28) Return to Archives
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