There might be a considerable advantage for web based services which cater
to multiple languages. This would have a business advantage for commercial
sites and increased community service for non-commercial sites.
So people can find my documents, I have translated my home page into the
five available languages. See the links at the top of my home page:
http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw/
For each language I created a separate web page (with meta-data to indicate
the language used) and registered them with AltaVista. Curiously AltaVista
doesn't translate the meta-data (not even the language indicator), so I had
to add this manually (including translated keywords and title).
The links from the translated pages I have redirected to AltaVista's service
for translation on the fly. This is to avoid having to maintain multiple
language copies of every web page.
The idea is to provide a compromise between everything in English (which
people searching in other languages wouldn't find) and everything in every
language (which would be a maintenance problem). Readers can find the home
page in their language, but then have to request translation of subsidiary
documents.
As, I don't read any of the languages, I checked by machine translation back
again to English. The results were mildly amusing:
* voyages of tourists of Hello-technology of the world
was: "Hi-tech tourist Journeys of the World"
* Structure Of Horizontal
was: "Landscape Architecture"
* Occasional Restoration
was: "Casual Catering"
As a result of this I am modifying the original English text to make the
translation better. For example replacing "Hi-tech" with "High Technology".
However, even so the automatic translation should be useable and better than
nothing.
Are there any packages specifically for preparing text for translation into
multiple languages? The idea would be to make the original text simple,
clear and free from jargon. I suspect that running the text through a
grammar checker first would help.
This should be a better approach than writing the text for one language and
then worrying about each translation separately. It would be similar to the
approach of writing computer programs for multiple user interface standards.
This should also bring out the importance of good web document design.
Poorly designed web sites which consist of graphics with bit mapped text
could not be automatically translated.
Tom Worthington http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw PO Box 13
Immediate Past President tomw@acslink.net.au Belconnen ACT 2617
Australian Computer Society Fax: 0419 499422
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Culture on the net, 15 May: http://www.acslink.net.au/~tomw/irc/irc19.html