Filed under: Utilities, Productivity, Web services, Education
Frengly does translation, but does it beat Babelfish?
Frengly's language detection is even cooler than Google's, for a couple of reasons. First, you don't have to select auto-detection from a language list, like you do in Google Translate. If it's automatic, why should it take an extra step?
Second, you don't have to select a target language from a menu. You can just click it, and the original text remains on screen. If you want another language, just click again.
Frengly doesn't do webpages, and doesn't have a bookmarklet. If that's the bulk of what you want to do, stick with Google for now. On the other hand, it does save a list of your translations. If you're looking for a translator to help you do homework or understand a few words in a book you're reading, look no further.
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)
Quikboy said 12:53PM on 11-28-2008
I love how Frengly does it's auto-detection, well except when I typed "I love candy", it auto-detected 'MS' (which I'm sure is not English) and also couldn't translate it because it was 'probably too short'. Kinda weird...
The choice of languages is great though and it's simplicity is awesome.
However, I'd like to suggest using Windows Live Translator for translating websites. It offer 4 view of seeing a page (inc. side-by-side view), much faster to access language options, and the text hover translation comes quicker. Just wanted to share that tidbit.
http://windowslivetranslator.com/
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Jake said 6:39PM on 11-28-2008
It appears, that it is using Google to translate the text... hmm.
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Liviu said 6:44PM on 11-28-2008
I'm from Romania.... For me "google translate" or "frengly" is better than babelfish....
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laifhakur said 10:20AM on 12-02-2008
This website is definitely simply using Google translation API
Look in source and see this Javascript file:
http://frengly.com/js-obfuscated/jsapi.js
Here is the original source from google
http://www.google.com/jsapi
The are exactly the same except that frengly is "obfuscating" the code by removing line breaks and maybe a few other tricks. However, if you look at the beginning text, you can see they are identical.
BTW,
ForiSearch.com also taps into Google translation API.
However it allows you to search for images and videos from foreign language website.
Example uses: See what images and videos the Russians are posting about president Bush. Find some images and videos of a Korean actress from Korean websites.
Like Frengly, ForiSearch is not exactly a major innovation. Its mostly about saving time with an enhanced interface.
The basic idea is that there are plenty of websites out there with images you may want to find, that are not written in English (or whatever your native language is). Overall, it helps open up parts of the web you normally wouldn't reach during your normal image searches. It works with Google, MSN, and Yahoo and probably more soon.
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Jack said 6:14PM on 12-14-2008
I'm very new to these Translator Programs...
But I've found the same problem with all the ones I've tried to use:
If I don't know what the language on the page IS - Then I can't get it to
translate into my own language.
Aren't there any programs, where all I need to do is put in my 'Default'
Language... like english... so then whenever a page pops up that is written in anything that isn't english, the program can automatically kick in and translate the page for me.
That'd be ideal - and i can't be the only one who think so. To have that as a feature would allow me to read pages and ideas I'd otherwise never be exposed to.
And the way the programs I've tried out....
require me to first type in thename of the language that's written on the page, before it will begin to do any translations. Is it not possible to have the computer recognize the language on the page? Does it really need ME telling it what that language is? What if I don't know what that specific language is? All I know for certain sometimes is that it is Not MY language.
What then? I'm just out of luck?
It seems to be thesse programs are setup with that premise: That we will all be able to correctly recognize and label every language we come across.
That's ridiculous.
And there's no way that's going to happen, making this much more difdficult then need be. And yes. There certainly are times when we'd like a specific language to language option.
But generally speaking - Don't most people just want to be able to read the friggin page!
Period?
So unless I've missed that button...
I can't use these translators the way I'd really like to.
And please.....
If someone reading this DOES know of a way to run any translation programs another way, please leave a comment et let it be known.
I'd be very grateful.
Thanks.
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