Verstehen Sie Deutsch? News Flash: According to Global Research surveys, 63.5 percent of Internet users speak a primary language other than English, according to statistics compiled as of September 2002. While accessing equipment and support is still the major impediment to getting online for most of the world's population, not comprehending the main language used on the Web is also a major problem. Fortunately, Web sites written in languages other than English are increasing dramatically, but that doesn't mean that language should be a dividing factor on the Internet. There are many tools and resources available to promote community building and to help your library staff communicate with a truly global audience. Free online translation You or your patrons can get a translation of a whole Web page or just a few paragraphs of text by using Babel Fish, the free translation service from AltaVista. The system will make a rough, literal translation from English to French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish, and back to English. Babel Fish uses machine translations that utilize a crude, human-programmed logic to translate words and phrases. While machine translations perform better than word-for-word translations (where the grammar is all but completely ignored), they are still very literal and contain many (sometimes amusing) errors. Despite this shortcoming, Babel Fish can be a great help in getting a fair understanding of a language of which library staff members would otherwise have no comprehension. There are many similar services on the Web, such as Systran and FreeTranslation, which will translate English to Chinese and Japanese, in addition to other languages. Dictionaries on the Web At yourDictionary.com you can find a selection of translation dictionaries for more than 200 languages, an online translation service, and other language resources. While there are dictionaries for many more languages than those covered by Babel Fish or Translate-Mail, most of the dictionaries only allow you to type in a single word or very small phrase, as they translate word-for-word rather than in context. Web pages and languages Did you ever wonder how to get special characters that don't show up on your keyboard on your Web pages? The trick is to use what are called "character entities," which are basically codes to represent the special characters you want to use. These character entities all begin with the "&" symbol and end with the ";" punctuation. For example, the "(c)" character is coded as "(c)." Often, if you use a full-featured Web page authoring program such as Macromedia Dreamweaver or Allaire Homesite, you can copy text that uses these special characters from your word processing program and paste it into your Web page authoring program, which will convert many of the special characters for you. Some resources for learning about special characters and the Web: Additional resources The Prospector: Links to online translation services Translation.net: Commercial translation service with a large list of internet translation resources Major search engines and directories have listings for certain languages/geographic regions - check out Yahoo! and AltaVista Babylon.com also offers a suite of tools for translating and referencing definitions online and offline.
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| Languages and the Internet |
Web-based translation software lets you communicate via the Internet in virtually every language. Just be mindful that some translations may not be all that accurate.
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