Translation services open up the world of blog views

If you can’t find anything worth reading on the more than 60 million English-language blogs, use free online translation services to transform Web browsing into a truly worldwide experience.

Although the automated services often provide clunky translations only a computer could love, Google and other companies are boosting accuracy. And if you’re planning to work, play or study in a foreign land — or just want to gather perspectives from unfamiliar cultures — translators can deliver useful nuggets of information.

Machine language translation hit the mainstream 10 years ago this month when AltaVista launched Babel Fish. That service — named after the universal translating creature from Douglas Adams’ “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” — elicits a nostalgic smile from Web 1.0 veterans, but it’s still swimming. Rebranded last year as Yahoo Babel Fish, it’s available at babelfish.yahoo.com.

Users can translate Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish into English in 150-word chunks — perfect for many blog posts. They also can enter URLs to translate entire Web pages.

Microsoft’s beta Translator service, at translator.live.com, offers to translate text in 500-word blocs, as well as Web pages by URL. It handles Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish.

As usual, though, the most exciting innovations are coming from Google. The beta Google Translate, at translate.google.com, enables visitors to paste chunks of foreign-language text or URLs for full-page translation like the other services. And while Babel Fish doesn’t support Arabic-to-English translations and Microsoft doesn’t do Greek-to-English, Google does both — along with all other languages listed above.

But what’s really cool is that Google offers translated search in all supported languages. That means users no longer have to stumble across a foreign-language site that looks promising and then paste the URL or text snippet into a translator.

Instead, they simply type an English-language query into the Translated Search field, tell Google via drop-down menu which language to search in and then wait an eye-blink while the service finds the appropriate foreign sites and translates results back into English.

Yahoo has been innovating along similar lines with its Search Translator — offering French- and German-speaking users the ability to run searches in their own languages and bring back translated foreign-language results, for instance — but English speakers won’t find that option at the Babel Fish site.

So if you’re wondering, say, how Arabic bloggers view the Iraq war or what Chinese bloggers have to say about the Aquadots recall, enter key phrases into Google’s Translated Search box to get a rough notion of how writers in other cultures view these issues.

If a given notion seems too rough, searchers can click a “suggest a better translation” link and tweak the syntax of the text until it makes more sense. Google promises to use the human input “to improve translation quality in future updates to the language pairs we’ve developed.”

In addition, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo all provide free widgets bloggers can add to their sites so that visitors can translate pages into any supported language with one click.

Most of these services are still used mainly to decipher “single words, short phrases, few long texts and relatively few Web pages,” according to a recent conference presentation by a researcher from the U.K.’s University of Manchester and a past president of the International Association for Machine Translation.

The growth in translation query volume has been less than breathtaking, the presentation added, rising from about 50,000 per day in December 1999 to just 3.4 million a day in September 2006.

But Google’s Translated Search initiative raises hope that we might someday use something like Adams’ fabled Babel Fish or Star Trek’s Universal Translator to render the entire Internet in our native tongues.

Don’t you love it when science fiction gets translated into science fact?