Comments on: International Blogging with Babelfish

By: hansstrahl

hansstrahl — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:00:22 +0000

Good idea. But it is a little bit complicated for the readers.

If you want to change your current blog into something that can be read by people from all over the world, you can make their reading much easier by installing the WordPress Global Translator Plugin.

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 23:19:28 +0000

I actually own rights to some very good translator software, and the right to adapt it to a WordPress plugin.

However there are quite a few dangers in providing such a product I need to look into, because you might not legally be allowed to publish a translated copy of 3rd party content.

If it requires clicking and provides output enclosed by javascript so it can’t be parsed by search engines, it might be fully legitimate.

If it provides a cached version that is search engine readable at a later date, it might be a breach of copyright.

By: Jonah

Jonah — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 22:50:05 +0000

Check out Angsumanâ€™s Translator Plugin Pro for wordpress to add machine translation to you own blog and give your foreign readers a one-click solution…

By: Andy Beard

Andy Beard — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:43:21 +0000

Elena I fully agree with you. In the machine translation software I helped publish many years ago, we also included special modes for translating different types of documents, such as legal, medical, scientific, and in each case a special dictionary was used.
Unfortunately, such control over database usage isn’t widely available for website translation tools, especially those that are provided free of charge.

When we first launched the software, we actually had some bad press. A radio station used it to translate a Polish document automatically into English, and then back the other way, and read out the result suggesting it was a “typical example” of the translation possible.

Obviously such software is not intended to be used in that manner. The same version of the software allowed me to take the Polish manual, and as someone with a very limited understanding of Polish, create a well written English version, better than the poor efforts from professional (but native Polish speaking) translators.

I found it easier to translate from Polish, than rewriting often very poor quality “stilted” professional translations full of mistakes.

By: Elena Temnova

Elena Temnova — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:32:25 +0000

In fact, translation of special terms is at the same time a soft spot of MT systems, and – it’s paradoxal – their strong point. If you take a “raw” MT system and try to translate a special text, you will see someting absurd. But using special dictionaries (many MT systems allows to add words and collocations into user dictionaries), you will see that MT can work. Special terms can change from “enemies” of MT to its “friends” – because, usually, a special term has a fixed meaning and, as consequence, a fixed translation in the target language, and substitution of one word by another is the most easy task for a computer.

By: Elena Temnova

Elena Temnova — Sun, 12 Nov 2006 20:26:14 +0000

>>>Now I am very used to untangling machine translated documents into my native tongue. There are always errors with machine translation, and you should never rely on it to translate accurately into a foreign language. It is useful if you are translating into your native tongue, and are aware of the many technical terms that might be used in a document and that might be translated as garbage.

By: Dane Morgan

Dane Morgan — Sat, 11 Nov 2006 21:24:37 +0000

Hey Andy,

Nice idea. I had thought about using babel to translate my page, and have the multiligual thingamabobbie from a recent fire sale on my to look over list, but had not really thought of using Bable to read and thus get in on foriegn blog conversations. I’ll have to give this a go next time I land on one.