For Firefox users: The World Wide Lexicon.. Automatic, transparent translation..

[Fumesucker]

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/13897

The World Wide Lexicon Translator makes browsing foreign languages sites easy and automatic. Simply open a URL. It detects its language and translates using human and machine translations. With it you can view and create translations for any website.

[Bonobo]

1. Woohoo! More humans rendered obsolete!

What a great world we live in!!!

[Fumesucker]

2. I guess you missed the part where human translations are given first?

:shrug:

[Bonobo]

3. Big deal. It is reusing human translation with no compensation at all.

Same thing.

Scatter translation, I bet. That means they got it all for free.

[Fumesucker]

4. And pony express riders are out of a job too..

What is the world coming to?

I for one would never be able to afford to pay a human translator to read every foreign website I might (or might not) be interested in.

[Bonobo]

5. Yeah, I hear you. Just venting a little.

I am a translator.

Prices have halved in last 10 years.

Harder to make a living.

[Fumesucker]

7. I understand..

I kind of figured you were a translator.

But on the bright side, I think the more easily people can communicate between cultures the more cooperative we can be.

And my income has gone down by more than half in the last ten years so I sympathize with you there.

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

6. You Were Rendered Obsolete Long Ago...

[Fumesucker]

8. At least some of us had a useful function at one time..

:eyes:

[OPERATIONMINDCRIME]

10. Some Of Us Still Do.

:hi:

[Fumesucker]

12. For some defninitions of "useful" perhaps..

Opinions vary..

:hug:

[Bonobo]

11. I love you too, OMC. nt

[Posteritatis]

14. Shouldn't you be smashing some looms? (nt)

[ddeclue]

9. Nice theory.. try translating something in American colloquial English to Spanish and back again

using babelfish.

Software does a terrible job of it.

Only humans can adequately translate human language.

[Fumesucker]

15. I've done it..

And yes, it's not the greatest.

I can usually make myself understood to non-English speakers and understand them well enough to do business online through computer translation.

What I usually do is just what you said, translate to the other language and then back again, tweak until I can grasp the meaning of the dual translation.

[Posteritatis]

13. No such thing as good automatic translation yet. (nt)

[Fumesucker]

16. Not "good" but often "adequate"..

It depends on your specific purposes.

[Bonobo]

17. Fortunately, it still sucks for Japanese. nt

[lunatica]

18. Reminds me of the time a machine translated Al Gore as

El Sangriento (bleeding). The rest of the translation was idiotic too. It's just not the same. Funnier, but not the same

[Fumesucker]

19. Which reminds me of the time Fred Sanford was drinking Sangria..

Asked the Hispanic dude what it meant, he said "blood"

Fred spit it all over the place.. :)

[Vidar]

20. Very cool. Thank you. I love Firefox.