translate posts

Filed under: OS Updates, Utilities, Windows, Microsoft, Freeware, Windows x64

Vistalizator changes your display language on Windows 7 and Vista

by Lee Mathews Oct 22nd 2009

Every now and then I have the honor of reinstalling Windows on a customer's system in a language other than English - usually French, since I happen to work in Canada.

Trouble is, all my installation media is English which means the resulting OS would sport an English interface. Thankfully, Vistalizator makes switching languages a painless process. Grab the required language pack, fire up Vistalizator, and follow the on-screen instructions. In a short while, you'll be able to reboot your system into the newly-translated shell.

While this was originally a Vista utility, as of the October 17th release Windows 7 is fully supported.

Remember, you don't need Vistalizator if you're running an Ultimate edition - you can just run one of the standalone language packs. As luck would have it, they're also linked on the Vistalizator site for easy download. You'll find them grouped by OS on the download page.

Tags: interface, language, multilanguage, translate, vistalizator

Filed under: Security, Utilities, Web services, Microblogging

Translate before you tweet, using Twinslator

by Jay Hathaway Aug 18th 2009

As Twitter's worldwide growth continues, non-English-speakers are adopting it in larger numbers. And when we don't all speak the same language, it might sometimes be necessary to translate a tweet into something other than your native tongue. Twinslator makes that very easy, by providing what's essentially a mashup of Twitter and Google Translate. It's a translator you can tweet from.

If you don't translate very often, it might not thrill you to save a minute or so and a little copy-paste from the regular Google Translate site. If you do it frequently, though, Twinslator could be great for you. Twinslator also wisely gives you the option of double-posting the original tweet and the translation, so the maximum number of your followers will get the message. Even if it's not likely to be wildly popular, it's still nice to see someone acknowledging the global scope of Twitter and attempting to connect cultures

Tags: false, google-translate, languages, translate, translator, twinslator, twitter

Filed under: Fun, Text, Time-Wasters, Web, Humor

Translation Party achieves hilarious results using Google Translate - Time Waster

by Jay Hathaway Aug 14th 2009

Translation Party is a site that automates the old trick of running a sentence through machine translation until it's humorously unintelligible.

Instead of manually copy-pasting into Babelfish or Google Translate, you can just put in a phrase once, hit enter, and watch as Translation Party passes it back and forth between English and Japanese, getting further from your original meaning every time.

The translation doesn't stop until it reaches equilibrium, meaning that it repeatedly gets the same English result every time. Some phrases never achieve equilibrium, but Translation Party knows when that's happening and gives up after a while.

As an example of the strange results you might end up with, check out what came out when I put the first sentence of this post into Translation Party: "Party, machine translation, translation SAITOYUMORASU, perform the most common way to get to know me."

Tags: funny, google-translate, japanese, translate, translation, translation-party

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Windows, Freeware

Fried Babelfish takes Google Translate out of your browser

by Brad Linder Jan 15th 2009

Fried Babelfish is a desktop application for Windows that lets you translate text from one language into another. Despite its name, the program is powered by Google Translate, not Babelfish (an older version used the Babelfish web translation service).

You need an internet connection to use Fried Babelfish, but you do not need a web browser. This makes it easy to translate text in one window while typing in another without having to flip back and forth beween browser tabs or windows. It can come in handy if you're instant messaging someone who speaks a different language or if you just need to translate a few words on a web page you're reading.

Fried Babelfish was created as one of 35 freeware applications as part of the Donation Coder New Apps for the New Year challenge.

Tags: donation-coder, fried-babelfish, google-translate, translate, translation

Filed under: Internet, Google, Web

How to say where is the bathroom in 34 languages at once

by Brad Linder Dec 12th 2008

Planning a trip around the globe and need to make sure you know how to ask for directions to the train station in two dozen languages? Nice Translator can help.

Nice Translator is powered by Google Translate, so you get the same results from Google. But the interface is incredibly easy to use. Just select the languages you want to translate text into and start typing. Nice Translator will convert your words as soon as you type them.

The site also works on mobile devices like the iPhone if you happen to need to ask a passing stranger if you're getting a good price on that souvenir you've been haggling over. The answer, by the way, is probably no.

[via WebWare]

Tags: google-translate, nice-translator, translate

Filed under: Internet, Web services, web 2.0

Mloovi translates RSS so you don't have to learn a foreign language

by Brad Linder Aug 7th 2008

I have a hard time reading some of my favorite blogs, including Eee PC News and Blogeee because, well, I don't speak German or French. Not fluently anyway. Historically, I've tried to deal with this limitation of mine by subscribing to each site's RSS feed and trying to figure out what articles are about by squinting at the headlines, scratching my head, and looking at the pictures. Every now and again I find something I think might be interesting and I pop it into Google Translate. But I'm fairly certain I'm missing some interesting stories this way.

Mloovi is a new service that makes it much easier to follow a blog or news site published in a language you don't speak. Mloovi basically takes the contents of the feed, runs it through Google Translate, and then syndicates a new feed.

There are a few limitations to Mloovi-generated feeds. First, you'll occasionally be confronted with an advertisement, but Mloovi needs to make money somehow. Second, Mloovi strips images from RSS feeds and only shows a partiel feed even if a web site's original feed was full text. But Mloovi can still be big time saver if you want to follow some foreign language sites. Mloovi works with any languages supported by Google Reader, including Chinese, Japanese, French, German, Hindi, Norwegian and English.

Mlovi also has a handy widget that lets web publishers offer subscription links in mulitple languages.

[via ReadWriteWeb

Tags: mloovi, rss, translate

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Lingro: Look up definitions, translations on any page

by Brad Linder Jun 10th 2008

Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click on the flag iconts to translate words into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, or Swedish.

The definitions are culled from publicly available dictionaries and user contributions filed under a Creative Commons license. So if you find a word without a definition, a message will pop up asking if you'd like to contribute one. Of course, the odds of your clicking the word if you already knew the meaning are pretty slim (unless you're say, writing a review of Lingro).

You can also use Lingro the old fashioned way, by visiting the service's home page and typing in a word or entering a web address to translate. There's even a service that lets you upload a file from your desktop for translation into another language.

Honestly, we didn't have much luck translating entire web sites. But Lingro's dictionary definitions and single word translations seem pretty good.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Tags: dictionary, lingro, translate, translation

Filed under: Internet, Web services

Reverso: Why just translate when you can also conjugate?

by Brad Linder Mar 19th 2008

There are plenty of web services that will let you translate chunks of text from one language to another. And Reverso is certainly one of them. But Reverso has a few tricks up its sleeve that you won't find in Google Translate, Windows Live Translator, or Babel Fish.

Near the top of the Reverso web page are four tabs: Translation, Dictionary, Conjugator, and More. The translation tool does a decent job of translating text to and from several languages: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. But if you click on the Dictionary tab, you can enter a word, choose a dictionary, and get a more precise definition. And if you click on the conjugate tab, you can practice conjugating your verbs in the language of your choice.

Unlike many other popular web translation services, Reverso does not offer a way to translate entire web pages online. But Windows users can purchase Reverso's desktop application that offers this feature. Or you could, you know, use another service if and when you want to translate complete pages.

[via A Little Bit of Everything]

Tags: reverso, translate, translation

Filed under: Internet, Blogging, Google, Microsoft

Add a translation widget to your web page

by Brad Linder Nov 9th 2007

The beauty of the web is that your personal homepage could have an international audience. Of course, visitors from Russia, Korea, or Japan might have a hard time reading your English-only website.

There are plenty of tools out there that let proactive internet users translate a web page. But you can also make it easy on visitors by adding translation widgets to your blog or web site.

This week Microsoft released a widget for Windows Live Translator. And it's pretty slick. All you have to do is copy a tiny bit of code to your web page, and a drop down box will show up on your site letting visitors know that they can "translate this site" in a variety of languages including German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

If you're more of a Google person, we also dug up a widget that uses Google Translate, but it's a bit less elegant. This widget will simply add a series of links to your page that let visitors know they can translate the site into Arabic, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and so on.

What tricks do you have for making your web site internationally friendly?

Update: Google has launched an official translation widget for your web page as well. Their widget doesn't blend into all web sites very well just yet (it assumes you have a white background), but does offer a faster translation.

[via Bink.nu]

Tags: google-translate, translate, translation, widgets, windows-live-translator

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Google

Automatically translate RSS feeds with Google Reader and Firefox

by Brad Linder Oct 30th 2007

Ever wish you could RSS feeds in German, Russian, and Japanese without taking the time to learn those languages? Sure, you could just visit your favorite Chinese websites every day using a web page translation service. But Download Squad Reader Patrick Hornik turned us on to a much better method.

Google Reader Translate is a Firefox add-on that adds a translation feature to Google Reader. It won't translate full feeds for you (that would probably take forever), but it does translate every headline in a given feed. Click on the article and it will open up in a new window using Google Translate.

Unfortunately, while Google Reader Translate converts any language covered by Google Translate to English, Slovak isn't one of them. And that's the language the article describing this Firefox add-on is written in. It's not too hard to find the download link though. Just scroll through the page until you find the text "je mo?né inštalova? tu (XPI súbor)"

In order to translate a feed, you'll need to rename it in Google Reader, placing a three character preface before the title. For example, if you want to translate German to English, you would name the feed .de [feed title]. For Spanish, you would use .es [feed title].

[Thanks Patrick!]

Tags: add-on, firefox, google-reader, translate

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Microsoft, Beta

Microsoft launchs Windows Live Translator beta

by Brad Linder Sep 9th 2007

The arms race between Microsoft and Google has just gone up another notch with the release of Windows Live Translator. Much like Google's Translate Tool, Windows Live Translator lets you enter a block of text for translation from one language or another, or you can enter a URL to have an entire web page translated. Also like Google, Microsoft's web-based translation tool is powered by Systran.

But the interface is quite different. Enter a URL in Google Translate, choose your language options, and you essentially see a full screen version of the website with the text replaced by a computer's best guess of what each word and phrase means. Windows Live Translator doesn't have a full screen option, but gives you a choice of views:

See each page side by side
See one page on top of the other
See the original page, with each line translated as you hover your mouse over it
See a translated page with the original text of each line displayed as you hover your mouse over it

You have a variety of languages to choose from, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. But as with any machine based translation, don't expect Windows Live Translator to give you a perfect translation. But it should give you a good idea of how much that Japan-only notebook computer you've had your eye on really costs.

[via Google Operating System]

Tags: google translate, GoogleTranslate, systran, translate, translation, windows live, windows live translator, WindowsLive, WindowsLiveTranslator

Filed under: Web services, Google

Help make Google translations better

by Brad Linder Mar 2nd 2007

Google has added a new feature to its translation tool: "Suggest a better translation." When you're reading a Google translation, the new tool gives you a chance to catch mistakes and send them to Google, which will help the developers improve translations down the road. It's not clear if this is a learning feature of the translation software or if a real person will read your suggestion and figure out whether to make a change.

Here's how it works. As you read a page, if you move your mouse pointer to a line of text, that text will be highlighted and a little "suggest a better translation" link will pop up.

Of course, this begs the question, why are you using Google to translate pages if you already know how to read them?

Right now only a few languages are supported:

English to/from Arabic
English to/from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
English to/from Russian
Simplified Chinese to/from Traditional Chinese

Tags: google translation, GoogleTranslation, suggest a better translation, SuggestABetterTranslation, translate, translation

Filed under: Internet, Open Source

Real-time translation for Yahoo! IM

by Jordan Running Jan 6th 2006

A company called AvMedia has released an open-source translating proxy for Yahoo! Messenger. It does translation between English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese using Google's web translation services. Considering the state of machine (or at least Google) translation, this is bound to cause all sorts of comical misunderstandings.

[Via Slashdot]

Tags: google, im, translate, translation, yahoo, yahoo messenger, yim

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