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Tech Know: Lost in translation Your ISP has just sent you an email in Japanese. Is it a service announcement? Kristen McQuillin shows you three ways to find out. It appeared in your Inbox this morning—a message in Japanese from "Customer Support." But your limited knowledge of Japanese, especially before your first espresso, has you stumped. What's it all about? Don't panic. There are three excellent online tools to solve this mystery: Babelfish, Jim Breen's WWWJDICT, and Rikai.
To use any of these services, your computer must be able to display Japanese. If you're running Windows 2000 or Mac OS 9 or higher, you're set—those operating systems have built-in Japanese support; if you're not, you can still view Japanese in your web browser by downloading Japanese fonts and adjusting your user preferences. For online instructions, search for "viewing Japanese web pages" at www.google.com or check your browser's help files.
Rough and strange
Back to your mystery message: Copy the text of your Japanese
mail. Launch your browser and go to AltaVista's Babelfish (http://babel.altavista. "NTT east Japanese service you to utilize thank you from usually truly. In addition, you to propose this each time thank you truly concerning the B????east. 'The flow to start of service' we inform below. It is the long sentence, but because they are important contents, by all means perusal."
Clearly, Babelfish has its limitations. It doesn't recognize special
words like "FLETS," and context isn't understood,
so the results are sometimes disjointed. Still, it makes a fun variation
on the classic game known as Telephone. Translate a paragraph from one
language to another, then to a third language, then back to the original.
How much of the original meaning is preserved?
Doublespeak The most comprehensive online J-E dictionary available, the WWWJDIC project has been in progress since 1991 when Breen, a professor in the computer science department at Monash University in Australia, started adding entries to an early J-E computer dictionary. The project now has over 70,000 entries in the main dictionary and over 12,000 kanji, plus names and numerous glossaries of special business and science terms. One shortcoming of translating with WWWJDIC is that it breaks up your message line by line, which can make checking a long passage a little tedious.
Pop-up translations
If you want to see the Japanese and English text simultaneously, try Rikai (www.rikai.com/cgi-bin/Home.pl?Language=En). Todd David Rudick, a software engineer based in Tokyo, developed a novel approach with this service. When you paste your text into the text box and run your cursor over the results, it shows you a pop-up window with the definition of the individual kanji or word you're hovering over. This is excellent if you can read some Japanese, but need help with some of the kanji. Armed with these tools, you can turn the tables by writing something in English and letting Babelfish give you a Japanese translation. However, getting the best machine translation may require you to adjust your usual writing style, so keep these points in mind: Tips for writing for machine translation Photo credit: screen shots |
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641: Buckets of bits
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