Date:    Mon, 9 Feb 1998 13:36:39 -0500
<br>From:    Larry Horn  laurence.horn[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]YALE.EDU 
<br>Subject: Re: Automatic translation
<br>
<br>At 1:08 PM -0500 2/9/98, Allan Metcalf wrote:
<br> This was posted recently on the discussion list for administrators of ACLS
<br> societies. (Yes, there's a list for everything!) It's news to me . . . and
<br> maybe news to some others on ADS-L. - Allan Metcalf
<br> 
<br>                                
<br> I have recently
<br> learned of an interesting website developed by Digital that offers instant
<br> translations between English and German, French, Italian, Portuguese, and
<br> Spanish. By putting a link on your homepage to that site, users can have
<br> your pages and all hyperlinks in your site translated into one of these
<br> languages.
<br> 
<br> Go to http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/cgi-bin/translate? and type in
<br> the URL for you homepage and select a language into which you would like it
<br> translated. Follow the hyperlinks in your pages to see them translated as
<br> well. Graphics are unchanged but all text is translated.
<br> 
<br>
<br>
<br>It's pretty cute, but remarkably quirky. I just tried the English to French
<br>conversion (one of the few whose accuracy I can evaluate) on my own
<br>homepage and found particularly surprising the rendering of my "Fall" and
<br>"Spring" term courses as those for the "Chute" and "Spring" semesters
<br>respectively.  The former is a typical decontextualized
<br>take-the-first-entry error (la "chute" does indeed describe what the leaves
<br>do in the relevant season), but the latter is an odd surrender, since
<br>Spring--  "printemps" or even erroneously --  "source" isn't THAT hard to
<br>come up with.  And for some reason every instance of "negation" in one of
<br>my course descriptions is turned into "inversion"--'la double inversion'
<br>sounds vaguely sexy, but is ultimately incoherent.  I don't think the
<br>universal translator is at hand yet, but this babelfish is fun to play
<br>around with.
<br>
<br>Larry
<br>