Question about reading online news sources that are in Japanese

[Dover]

Besides translation sites where you have to cut and paste words and paragraphs to get the English version, how can I get my computer to do translations of whole websites automatically? Does it require downloading special language software or is there some easier way to "teach" my computer to read other languages?

[Spider Jerusalem]

1. Can't do it automatically...

but Altavista's Babelfish ( http://babelfish.altavista.com ) does Japanese-English URL translation.

[Dover]

3. Thanks for the link. I notice that Babelfish links to language software

for "seamless" translation. Pretty expensive. I can't really use the regular paragraph translators like those on babelfish either,
because my computer doesn't show the actual Japanese characters when I go to a Japanese site. Instead I see gibberish symbols. So I can't copy and paste them into the translation windows to get the English translation.

But thanks for the site!

[Spider Jerusalem]

5. You're welcome...

there's another I know of, that sells interactive translation software... http://intertran.tranexp.de (starts @ $39.95, price depends on the language pair you want to translate).

Oh, and if you're running a Microsoft OS, you should go to the Windows update website and download the additional non-Western European character sets (there's Japanese, Chinese, Cyrillic, Eastern European)...that will enable you to do straight cut-and-paste translations. (and in the interim setting your character coding to "Unicode" might help.)

[Dover]

6. Thanks for the good advice. Will do!

eom

[pnorman]

8. IE Browser will handle Japanese.

Go to View>Encoding, and then mark "Unicode". That should handle all three East Asian languages, but the only sites I've tried so far are Japanese. I've never tried Babelfish on Japanese yet. I'm turning in now and will try it later.

pnorman

[Don_G]

2. I Wouldn't Want To Try It

Japanese to English requires more computing power than the CIA can guarantee. It's more a matter than differences in thinking than translating "El Gato" to "Evil Cat" from the Saturday morning cartoons.

Take two words, pronounce one without a vowel and you have forty different meanings depending on how those two words are used in a sentence with your tone and timber of voice.

Besides, you're asking if a 100+ character simplified alphabet can be reliably translated into 26 figures or less.

[Dover]

4. ??? The CIA ???

I do understand your point about language/meaning differences when attempting to translate, though. And don't know how or if those issues are somehow resolved with language translation software such as this:

http://www.systransoft.com/products/standard.html

[pnorman]

7. Software trial downloads here:

http://www.pspinc.com/LSG/transaide/download.htm

Download and install the Kanjikit 2000 Demo first, to enable the Japanese language. Then download and install the Translation Aide Demo. It does something they term "segment translation", and there are sometimes a few words that you have to do yourself. (I haven't touched it for a long while and my memory is a little hazy here).

The demos are good for 20 trials, so you'll be able to see if it's worth your while to spend $300 for the pair.

pnorman

[Dover]

9. MANY thanks for your help...and taking me through the steps.

That's a great idea.

[Lydia Leftcoast]

10. Don't believe the hype about translation software

The software companies have been giving the public the same hype ("perfect machine translation is only twenty years away") for about forty years.

There is nothing out there that is worth any money at all, and the farther apart the languages are, the worse results you'll get. Unlike a human, translation software doesn't try to understand what the text means if it's ambiguous.

I'm a Japanese-English translator, and that's what I do a lot of in real life: trying to figure out what the writer of an inept piece of prose actually meant to say.

[Dover]

11. Thank you. Now that's what I call an informed opinion.

I can certainly understand the problems of translation...even the ones that claim to be 'intuitive'. I don't think the English language even HAS words that can evoke or describe the true meanings of many foreign languages, and unless or until computers become human I doubt they will be successful.

I do have a question though. When you are learning Japanese or some other language, and you come upon such difficult-to-translate meanings, how do you grok their true meaning as understood by the natives of that language? I would imagine much of it is so embedded in the cultural and history and uniqueness of the natives that it would be very VERY difficult to grasp.

And the Japanese characters (unlike individual letters in English) seem to have a layering of meanings like a symbol might...is that correct?