[LINK] Say that again

[Tom Worthington]

At 02:25 PM 11/28/2005, Antony Barry wrote:
>Linkers ... I took the story at the above URL ... Used google translation 
>to spanish and then translated spanish to english  ... I'd say there is a 
>LONG way to go. ...

The results are not perfect, but as it is a choice between being able to 
read a poor machine translation, or not read something at all, I will 
choose the poor translation.
When I get a mail message in another language or find a web page which 
might be useful, it isn't practical to send it off to someone to translate.

The first time I showed a class of university students my web lecture notes 
translated on the fly into Chinese there was a collective intake of breath, 
as many in the room could read it 
<http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/urltrurl?lp=en_zh&url=http://www.tomw.net.au/2004/wd/index.html>. 
That isn't to say there weren't some snickers and puzzled looks about the 
quality of the translation; but they could read it.

Similarly being able to translate the interface for the Sahana disaster 
management system into other languages should be useful 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2005/wd/sahana2.shtml>.

In 2003 I attended a symposium for the Beijing 2008 Olympics Web Site 
<http://www.tomw.net.au/2003/bws/research.html>. What presenters said was 
simultaneously translated but their slides were not. This made the 
presentations a bit hard to follow. At the time I thought it would be 
useful to have two screens with the presentation in two lanaguges.

Web based slides translate as well. It would be possible for audience 
members with a wireless laptop or PDA to translate the slides themselves.



Tom Worthington FACS HLM tom.worthington at tomw.net.au Ph: 0419 496150
Director, Tomw Communications Pty Ltd            ABN: 17 088 714 309
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617                http://www.tomw.net.au/
Director, ACS Communications Tech Board   http://www.acs.org.au/ctb/
Visiting Fellow, ANU      Blog: http://www.tomw.net.au/blog/atom.xml