[sustran] Heads-up on machine translations

[Eric Britton]

Well, dear friends, I never thought I would end up pushing technology or
software per se on all of you out there. And certainly not from the folks
from Google.  But the time has come for me to share my best thoughts with
you about their and other's translation engines.

 

We have been using, normally struggling, with machine translation gizmos for
more than a decade now, as you will see if you go to any of our websites, we
attempt to provide one click translation to each page's content in half a
dozen languages.  While this takes time here, I am able to note that about
one in 10 of the people who come into our sites actually make use of the
machine translations.  And since we are addressing a world in which not
everyone is all that easy in English, especially for longer documents, this
is always seemed like a reasonable way for me  to spend a bit of time and
effort to make us all into better and more effective neighbors in an ever
smaller world.

 

But real breakthroughs have been made over the course of the last year or
so, to the extent in which some of these translation engines (and they do
compete with each other which of course is a fine thing) have developed to
the point in which they provide an entirely workable draft versions of the
original text.  Of course, this is not "translation" as one might hope that
best.  But if you are curious and have a certain mental agility, they can
tell you a great deal about what the original text is saying.

 

So here is my recommendation to you for the easiest way to handle this at
least for the time being.  If you use the latest versions of either Internet
Explorer or Firefox, you can go to www.google.com  and download their
toolbar (it is free, quick and safe).  And once you have done that, all you
have to do is add their translate utility to the toolbar.  Thus far all that
particular arrangement will do for the English language speaker  is, when
you are looking at some language other than English, to provide you with a
quick working version of the text in English, whether the original is in
Spanish, French, German, Portuguese or any of a surprising number of other
languages.

 

For two-way translations you can call up
http://translate.google.com/translate_t#  into your browser and off you go
for either a pretty good translation of selected text for websites.  You
will see how that works on the site itself, though I am sure a number of you
are well aware of this and use either the Google engine or some other when
it comes to dealing with text in languages that you may not entirely master.
I know I do.

 

Here are the Languages currently available for translation: Arabic,
Bulgarian, Catalan, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English,
Filipino, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian,
Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Norwegian, Polish,
Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swedish,
Ukrainian, Vietnamese. 

 

For testing purposes I have tried out several combinations with colleagues
working in more need exotic languages (Slovenian, Hebrew, Arabic, Finnish,
Danish) and though they have told me with a smile that this is not exactly
their equivalent of Shakespeare, they nonetheless get the gist of what I am
trying to say. (On the other hand my Japanese and Chinese friends were far
more puzzled, and reserved. But let's give the translators time. I have
confidence that they will continue to shrink the planet in for once what are
benevolent ways)

 

I very much hope you find some use of this, and that may be in one more
small way we are together taking steps toward a more unified, sustainable
and democratic world.

 

With all good wishes,

 

Eric Britton

 

 

                   The New Mobility Agenda 

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                Technology transforms time and space

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      T:  +331 4326 1323  or  +339 7044 4179   Skype: ericbritton

 

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