Hmmm, a little serendipity for me this afternoon. I happened across a blog that included a translation service along the side. I could click a flag and the page would be shown in that language. I couldn’t get that particular one to work on my site (I think it was a purchased service) but I did find and incorporate the Fagan Finder Translation Wizard (it’s down there on the lower right if you’re actually reading this on my site). About 7 minutes after I plugged that in, Stephen Downes points to the following post about the possible future uses of Google Translator: The Universal Language. You can read more about Google Language tools here.
So what I’d like to know is whether the Fagan tool translates reasonably well into your language. I don’t read any others, but I’m regularly surprised with comments from around the globe, so I suspect there are some multi-lingual readers out there – can you let me know? Something like this would seem to be pretty important if you’re supporting distance students internationally – why not provide them with information in their native tongue (assuming this thing does a decent job).
Comments
4 Responses to “Do you have international students?”
Have you tried BabelFish? A pointer to the blog would be great too! Thanks.
Hi Randy, I did try the little Babelfish plugin (http://www.altavista.com/help/free/free_searchbox_transl) and while it looked nice on the page it would only translate the Banner at the top of my page!?! Nice to know how to say “Distant Librarian” in Korean, but it seemed lacking 😉
The original site that got me started was “The E-Business Weblog” (http://www.roell.net/weblog/), or natively, “Das E-Business Weblog” He’s got Fagan Finder there, but I couldn’t backtrack his little flags to find a full-fledged service behind them. Probably could’ve replaced his URLs with mine, but it didn’t seem worth the trouble… Perhaps you’ll see something I missed?
Ya, the BabelFish banner thingy seems to be broken. At one point, it was working 🙁
http://www.kbcafe.com/rss/?guid=20050614043833
I use the Google Translate service on my blog (top right corner) and it works great.
Would love to send you the code if anyone needs it.