The ‘World’ in World Wide Web Becomes More Visible
They call it the World Wide Web, but when was the last time you ventured outside our cyber borders to visit a foreign Web site? With improved browsers, better translation technology and a growing body of foreign content, surfing offshore keeps getting easier and more rewarding.
More than half the people on the Net are sitting somewhere outside the United States. The amount of non-English material they are generating is growing so fast that analysts expect more than half the content on the Web will be in a foreign language by 2003, up from 20% today.
A good place to start exploring is at https://www.all-links.com/newscentral, where you can find links to more than 3,500 international newspapers from Japan to Serbia. A lot of the leading newspapers, such as Japan’s Asahi Shimbun (https://www.asahi.com/english/english.html), are available in English.
If you speak a foreign language, so much the better; you can browse through the latest issue of France’s Le Monde (https://www.lemonde.fr) in the original, for example.
If you read Chinese, Korean or Japanese but have been stumped because your browser can’t handle those languages, take heart. Microsoft’s Internet Explorer version 5.0, released Thursday (download at https://Microsoft.com/windows/ie/default.htm) will guide you through the process of downloading the necessary software whenever you hit a page that requires it. It should be a lot easier than the current system that requires you to hunt down the necessary downloads on your own.
Foreign languages aren’t your strong point? Well, computer programmers have spent the last few decades breaking down the language barrier. Fortunately for you, they’ve had a good bit of success.
AltaVista (https://www.altavista.com) gets half a million hits a day on its special translation service. Click the language tab at the top of the search site and choose a foreign language--say, French. Do a search. You will get a list of French sites. At the end of each citation it will say “Translate” in bold. Click it, and the magic begins. Soon, the page you requested will appear in relatively comprehensible, if not elegant, English.
This process takes time because with every jump to a new page you are first taken back to AltaVista’s translation site. If you bookmark the site, the browser will automatically take you through the translation process each time you visit. Be warned: The machine translation doesn’t work on pages on which the text is treated like a picture or “frame.”
Another site that offers a slightly broader range of services is https://www.worldblaze.com. This site offers a good search engine that translates Web pages. Click on “e-mail” at the bottom of the page, and the site will let you translate your e-mail into any of five languages to help you correspond with your new foreign cyber-pals.
A San Clemente-based site, https://www.uni-verse.com, has a chat feature that supposedly allows you to chat in multiple languages. Unfortunately, you have to download special software.
Marc Bautil, director of marketing at Lernout & Hauspie, the Ieper, Belgium-based company that provides Worldblaze.com with its translation engine, says he expects that a growing number of Internet service providers, portals and newspaper publishers will begin including translation services directly on their sites in the coming months. That could mean quicker, more convenient translations.
Southern California-based Web sites, for example, are interested in broadening their audience by making their Web sites available in Spanish. The city of Bakersfield already uses Lernout & Hauspie’s technology so that visitors who want to see the site (https://www.ci.bakersfield.ca.us) in Spanish simply touch the Espanol button to get an automatic translation.
To test the translation capabilities of the systems, you can go to https://www.systranet.com/translate.html, which is run by the company that provides the technology for AltaVista’s translation service.
If you are a serious user of foreign-language literature--say you want to do online market research on Mexico or Germany--you might want to subscribe to an online translation service. For $29 a month, Itranslator (https://www.itranslator.com) will translate as many as 200 pages a month from any of 10 languages. You must pay extra for higher-quality translations.
Machine translation has been around for decades, and big corporations regularly use computers to translate technical manuals and other product information into multiple languages.
But Bautil says it is only recently that computers have become fast enough and software sophisticated enough to translate Web pages on the fly. Bautil says a Pentium II computer can translate 500 to 1,500 pages in an hour. He claims that even the lowest-quality translations allow consumers to understand 95% of the computer translation.
That, of course, is a matter of interpretation. What you understand depends a lot on how familiar you are with the issue at hand. For example, unless you were already familiar with the subject, you might have a tough time deciphering a machine-generated line taken from a recent article in Liberation (https://www.liberation.fr), a popular French publication. It refers to privacy concerns regarding serial numbers included in Microsoft’s Windows software, a controversy that came close on the heels of a similar issue with Intel’s Pentium chips:
“This business intervenes after the one of the ‘Big Brother Inside’ where each Pentium III was the object of a tattoo.”
Leslie Helm can be reached via e-mail at leslie.helm@latimes.com.
