Thursday, December 07, 2006

Making the best use of Internet

Internet has grown manifolds as a community. But delving deeper into this community, I could draw a conclusion that on the internet if you see the number of people visiting sites that are in the language they understand is higher, than the sites that are in other languages. Surprisingly, people have started cornering themselves again with the language barrier. But, now netizens don't need to worry, as there are online tools available that can do the translation of web pages to language of your choice from other languages on the fly. This indeed opens up few more areas where you can find information and use it too. I was searching for some resource on Debian Linux, and even after searching for two days I didn't find any information that would have helped me. Fortunately, search engines like Google, also add [Translate] link if the site is in some other language that can be translated. Finally, I ended up getting a proper explanation about the problem and its solution on a French site. Other sites offering similar service is Babelfish owned by altavista.com. In the initial stages translators were used more like humor generators where you feed in a sentence, reverse the result back into english and it use to be amusing, most of the time. Times have changed and now more languages are added, and, one can easily translate text/html pages from French, Portuguese, Russian, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, etc. There are still improvements going on and I am sure the translators would be able to translate texts without errors in the near future. A nice thing that has been added with this translators is that they also convert the links to go through the translators so that navigating the website is easy and seamless, as you don't have to do translation manually every time you click a link on the web page. Babelfish still does not have support for Russian, though they have it on their website, google scores on this. If someone is not obsessed with a particular site they can see the translations on all the websites available and see which site support a particular language better. Google Translation
Babelfish Translation

The sites that I commonly use. So, welcome to the yet unexplored area of Internet.