Language Translation

A friend of mine asked me to help him translate some training material from English to French. Having lived in France and Belgium for several years, I speak French fluently. Unfortunately that is not the same as being able to write fluently. I would guess I have the spelling ability of about a 3rd grader. Luckily computers are really good at spelling and so I agreed to help my friend.

While I could have loaded up the French dictionary in my word processor, I instead opted to use an online translation program called BabelFish. It has been around since 1999 but I first came across it in 2003 when it was taken over by AltaVista, one of the original Internet search engines. Yahoo now hosts the site.

BabelFish is a reference to a fictitious animal in Douglas Adams' book, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. By putting this fish in your year, it can instantly translate any language into the one you understand. The website works similarly. Just type in your text in English, select the language you want the translation, and click the translate button. Presto, your text is instantly translated in another window. Most of the time, it is pretty close. Sometimes it doesn't get the correct meaning of a particular word, but that is an easy fix if you understand the language. BabelFish was a huge help to my friend's project. Too bad it wasn't completely automatic. If it was, I could copy and paste the text of the training material into the website and be done with it. Oh well, maybe in the next version.