Content area
Full Text
When someone asked me how effective the automatic computerized translation services on the Internet are, I said I wouldn't trust them to translate into French "here's the bathroom?" Parenthetically, the literal translation would be "Ou est la salle de bains?", but if you are searching for the facilities in France, the recommended question is "Ott sont les toilettes?"
When I decided to evaluate AltaVista's service, cleverly named Babelfish (http://www. babelfish.altavista.digital.com), after the universal translator in Doug Adams' Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, I chose French and reviewed nine different sites. At first I thought that it would be a joke ("un gag"), as one French publisher said, but I was amazed at just how had it was. AltaVista, to some extent, acknowledges its own shortcomings in its Translation Tips section. Under Cheap Entertainment, AltaVista notes that "idioms and slang are notoriously hard to translate well." Another suggestion for "some good laughs" is translating from one language into another, then back to the original (English to French to English). AltaVista likens this to "the old game of Gossip."
Babelfish uses Systran translation software (http://www.systransoft.com). You can either type what you want translated into a query box or enter the URL of a Web page you want translated. Five languages are supported: French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. Your translation can be from any of these languages into English or from English into any of these. You cannot translate among the languages. If you want to translate French to German, Babelfish is not for you. Babelfish will also automatically search your translation on the Web through the AltaVista search engine.
TESTING BABELFISH
Before testing Babelfish on sites I located, I looked at the University of Cambridge's Faculty of Modern and Medieval Languages site (http://www.mml.cam.ac.uk/translation/ ans.html). Professors there evaluated Web-based machine translation and came to...