Somebody in Egypt is reading my blogposts in Arabic! I found an Egyptian interested in my Carnaval and Aquasan blogposts; by following a referral link to my blog. It looks really great. So if you ever end up in an Egyptian carnaval you know where they picked up the idea.We often encounter the question of working across different languages. It depends on the importance of the exchange whether you invest heavily in translations or not - by employing a certified translator.
An alternative could be to offer quick and dirty online translation services like:
- Prompt (upto 500 characters for free, thanks to Riny Heijdendael for showing me the tool)
- Babblefish
- Google translation (used in this case)
- To a blog you can add a translator widget
Wouter tipped me about two resources explaining how to add translation services to your blog:
Britt Bravo showed me her blogpost explaining the Worldwide Lexicon project. Using open source, this project stimulates readers of website or blogs who are bilangual to translate parts of the website in other languages. It is somewhere in the middle of the machine translations mentioned above (weakness: mechanical translations) and professional translations (weakness: costly).
What's the best tool at the moment?
8 comments:
Hi, this is great. I started looking for some more info about translations and finally managed to put an English flag to my blog which is able to dnamically translate all pages to English. Unfortunately not yet to other languages (that's only possible from English). They'll have to wait a little in China...
See it here.
I learned it here:
http://my.opera.com/yokey/blog/2007/07/27/how-to-add-google-translate-on-blogger
and here:
http://labnol.blogspot.com/2006/11/add-google-translation-flags-to-your.html
Hi, maybe I should do that too! I had to search for the English flag though, wonder if people can find it easily?
Hi Joitske and Wouter, this is really great. I just added the feature on the ICCO Alliance Learning Blog. Pitty it does not work from Dutch to other languages, but the solution is simple. We shoudl write in english.
the UK flag is here: http://www.google.com/images/flags/uk_flag.gif
Maarten, it does work from Dutch, but only to English. Theoretically it should be possible to submit the 'Dutch translated into English' site to translate it in turn to German, Japanase, Arabic and the rest of them. However, I'n not technical enough to do that.
Hi Joitske,
I posted an interview on the Net2 Blog a couple weeks ago with a translation project called Worldwide Lexicon that might interest you too:
http://www.netsquared.org/blog/
britt-bravo/
translate-your-nonprofit-blog
-or-website-worldwide-lexicon-project
Hi all, I can understand why people want to use online translations. The practicality inherent in it eludes no-one: it is (apparently) simple, and quick.
If you want a qualitative piece of translated work, I would always advise you to go to the professional!!! I speak as the son of a professional translator with four decades experience!!! (Gemini Translation
So, pls, kindly forgive if I don't take too well to online translations!!;-))
Thanks, good information !!
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