Berlitz online translator with voice5/16/2023 So far these Web translation services leave a lot to be desired. This fall, E-lingo will launch a similar service for Chinese and Japanese users. Badly translated information, but better than none. These provide multilingual search engines, powered by E-lingo, that trawl English sites for content and translate it into Spanish. Spanish speakers can search English-language sites for content on Latin American portals like. With so few good translation programs, are non-English-speaking Web surfers left out at sea? Not exactly. Wordwalla will then suggest a menu of words that come close to it, much like a spell checker. In the case of Mandarin-where there is no alphabet, just different characters made up of tiny ligatures-you can use your English keyboard to type in the phonetic equivalent of the word you are looking for. You can click on virtual keys on the screen or type words and sentences directly on your keyboard. A virtual keyboard pops up on your screen providing, say, Cyrillic or Arabic characters. To bypass these limitations, reconfigures your keyboard to handle 50 different languages, including Armenian, Icelandic and Hindi. It's tough to chat online in Hebrew with your Tel Aviv pals. Say you speak a non-European language with a different alphabet or script. The catch: For now, Babylon only translates English text into other languages, not the other way round.Īnd then there's the keyboard problem. If you click on the word "art" in "state of the art," it will respond "up-to-date modern." It also handles acronyms, technical terms and stock symbols, and can convert numbers (currencies, measurements and the like)-handy for online shoppers. By right-clicking on a word, a window pops up and offers a definition in any of 12 different languages, including Hebrew and Mandarin.īest of all, Babylon can recognize the context of a word. ![]() One of the best Web dictionaries, Babylon (downloadable at is designed for people who speak English as a second language. But don't be surprised if you type in the French word for bank ("banque") and get the following definition: "a refrigerated store where semen is kept before it is used in artificial insemination." You can even get the pronunciation by clicking an audio button. translates single words to and from English, Dutch, French, German, Italian and Spanish. Online translation dictionaries fare better. "How ya doin?" comes back in Spanish as "Como el doin del ya" or "How the doing of you?" Proper grammar, anathema to most online chatters, would help. But its onsite "interpreter" gets regularly stumped by slang. ![]() offers chat and instant messaging in French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish. ![]() ![]() Translation's toughest obstacle may be colloquialisms. The software behind these services spits out literal, word-for-word translations, often mangling grammar and meaning along the way.Ī translation of the Pledge of Allegiance into Spanish and then back into English, using AltaVista's Babelfish translator, yielded this robotic ranting: "I promise loyalty to the indicator of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it is stopped a nation under the indivisible God with freedom and justice stops everything." Huh? Sites like AltaVista, Freetranslation and Go Translator provide free electronic translation services for e-mail messages, text documents and Web pages into a dozen (mostly European) languages. Free information exchange and global e-commerce on the World Wide Web? Not yet. But more than 80% of Web content is in English. "The machine translation did such a crude job and put words in such odd places." Bogdanov is now talking to traditional translation shops like Berlitz.Īccording to research firm Computer Economics, 57% of Web users will speak a language other than English by 2005. The result: "People laughed," says All Music President Vladimir Bogdanov. When needed a fast, cheap way of translating the music reviews and artist bios in its online entertainment database, it installed a program that instantly translates text into six languages. That is, unless you want to crack up laughing. Web translation isn't the point-and-click affair it's cracked up to be.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |