Oct 30, 2006
Science blog goes international
UPDATE
I abandoned the international system on Sciencebase some time ago. The translation of documents with relatively high scientific content by Google and Babel is just so poor that I received several emails from readers saying just how bad it made the site look to those whose native tongue is not English.
OLD POST
Regular readers may have noticed the selection of national flags on the right-hand menu have now been demoted to the bottom of the column. We’ve been experimenting with inline machine translation to see how well it copes with a scientific technical site. A few readers have pointed out that the translations into their native tongue are at best amusing and at worse ludicrous.
The translation system is based on Google and the Babelfish (for Chinese) system and uses a plugin to produce translated versions of each post on-the-fly. The system seems to be far from perfect but might provide some of the gist of each post, although one Chinese readers thinks it doesn’t even do that.
At the moment, you can read the sciencebase blog, news and views in a version of the following languages Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Spanish. Please note, no automatic translation of a science site with its various technical terms is going to be 100% accurate, indeed the Google and Babelfish systems are not 100% accurate even for non-technical sites. But, we hope the system provides a flavour of our articles.
If we get any more complaints, we’ll probably ditch the system altogether, or at least until machine translation is less hilarious for readers.
Unfortunately, there are far too many inaccuracies and problems with the machine translation systems as they stand. If we hear that they’ve improved at some point in the future, I’ll reinstate the flags.
I’ve now added a script to the Sciencebase 1.0 pages so that the international flags should appear at the top of each of those pages. If you reach a version 1.0 page via the blog then please simply click the appropriate flag to start up the translation service.