Translating Comments
Translating a recent foreign-language comment proved too difficult for my usual text translation tool BabelFish. First BabelFish wanted me to tell it which language it would be translating “From” but I couldn’t figure that out because the message seemed like randomly paired vowels and consonants (terima kasih, saya begitu gembira, saya akan mencoba dan mengembangkannya. terima kasih). Apparently I wasn’t going to get very far with this until I determined what language this comment was written in.
The best tool I found for identifying a phrase’s native language was “What Language is This” at Ruphus.com which correctly identified the comment as Indonesian. Now all I had to do was find an online translation service which could translate from Indonesian to English.
BabelFish doesn’t translate Indonesian, Google Translation doesn’t translate Indonesian, but fortunately Translated.Net‘s “Free Translation Service” translates Indonesian. Not only that, but it also has an automatic language identification option which I wished I’d found about 10 minutes earlier. In one step, Tranaslated.Net’s software auto-identified the language used in the phrase and provided what looks like a pretty good translation. I wish other translation services were this easy to use. But as good as it is, this translation service has limitations; it only provides a few free translations before requiring you to use their fee-based services. This shouldn’t be a problem as long as you don’t abuse their generosity.
In case you’re curious, “Terima kasih, saya begitu gembira, saya akan mencoba dan mengembangkannya. Terima kasih.” loosely translates to, “Thanks for the code, I’m going to develop it further. Thanks again.”
So there you have it. If you occasionally need a quick and easy way to translate a comment, give Translated.Net‘s Free Translation Service a try. It worked for me.
If you’re still having trouble translating a comment left on your blog, you might be able to find help at Word2Word.Com’s page of Free Translation Services which lists over 50 free specialty (i.e. Papiamentu to English) translation services.
Good luck and happy communicating.
Comments(9)
RSS Feeds
Can’t be that great a translator then! nice one 😉
Haha, yes that says it all 🙂
Neil’s comment gave me an idea. I selected an English phrase:
“She could actually speak very good English but it was always amusing to see how warped the conversations became by the end of the day.”
Used BabelFish to translate it to Simple Chinese and back to English:
“She can speak the extremely good English but it always laughably to look in fact how warped the conversation to become before the day.”
And then from the above to Portuguese:
“Pode falá-lo o inglês extremamente bom mas sempre laughably para olhar no fato como entortado a conversação tornar-se antes do dia.”
From the Portuguese above to French:
“Peut le parler l’Anglais extrêmement bon mais toujours laughably pour regarder dans le costume comme déformé la conversation se devenir avant le jour.”
From the French above to Italian:
“Può il discorso l’inglese estremamente buono ma sempre laughably osservare nel costume così deformato la conversazione diventarsi prima del giorno.”
From Italian back to English:
“The speech can English extremely good but laughably always observe in the custom therefore deformed the conversation to become itself before the day.”
And for the final mangling BabelFish translated the English above to Japanese and back to English:
“Therefore as for England of the can of good speech very always with habit before the day itself but because it becomes the extent which can be laughed it makes become deformed you converse observe.”
I couldn’t have said it better myself. 😉
>>by the end up the day
Erm, excuse my poor English!
Some years ago when the internet was new and shiny and I had nothing better to do, my French house mate and I used to communicate via email using babelfish translations only – she could actually speak very good English but it was always amusing to see how warped the conversations became by the end up the day.
>>Indonesians have a very mild manner and they’re very soft-spoken
We could do with more people like that :]
I stumbled upon this web site when doing a search on AS3 ProgressEvent.Progress bug on IE7, a totally seperate topic, I know. I also happen to be fluent in Indonesian and I know I may not have the right to put my two-cents in, but here it is anyway. “Terima kasih, saya begitu gembira, saya akan mencoba dan mengembangkannya. Terima kasih.”
Literally, this says: “Thank you. I’m so happy, I will try and develop it. Thank you.” The machine was very close. Indonesians have a very mild manner and they’re very soft-spoken. They will say thank you at least once when it’s called for, especially when writing a letter. (I assume the person wrote an email thanking you for the code you posted on the site.)
Actually, “Thanks for the code, I’m going to develop it further. Thanks again.” is my human translation (modified capitalization, punctuation and grammar) of the machine results. The translator returns, “Thank you, I am so happy, I will try and mengembangkannya. thank you”. I had to run “mengembangkannya” through the translator on its own for it to be interpreted as “develop him”. If you patch the machine translation results together you get, “Thank you, I am so happy, I will try and develop him. thank you”.
Hope that clears things up for you. Sexist. 😉
it’s also interesting that i automatically presumed the writer to be a he.
i am rather thought provoked today.
thats interesting.
that’s interesting.
the writer of the comment said “Terima kasih, saya begitu gembira, saya akan mencoba dan mengembangkannya.”, which you loosely translated to “Thanks for the code, I’m going to develop it further.”. after that he sais “Thanks Again” but instead of adding an extra word for Again, he just sais what he started the sentence of “Terima Kasih”
so presumably, because he has said Thanks once in the sentence, but then has said Thank again, it translates it as, Thanks again… interesting. i wander if thats the language converter that has figured it out like that, or the way the actuall language itself is structured.