How to Quickly Translate Web Pages and File Pages

Some time ago a paper of mine was published in a medical journal and, I am happy to say,  it became widely read. Once in a while I would read a new article written by others that referenced my work. Hey, that is truly a chest-popper. You have to be really careful on such occasions that you do not wander outside during a rainstorm – you could easily drown with all of that water going up your nose!

After several years following publication of my paper, the thing traveled here and there around the world. Once in a while, when my curiosity and a bit of lingering pride dictated, I’d jump onto one of the Internet search engines and plug in my name. Out would come a listing of the familiar papers that had references to mine, but also there came papers that were not only new to the scene, but were written in languages that I did not understand very well or not at all.

Along came a new paper that had me listed as "Reference Number 1." Some Russian researchers wrote it. I wanted to see what they had to say about my "hot button" subject. That was not to be. Not only do I not speak or read Russian, I couldn’t even tell what the letters were that I viewed on my computer screen. For all I knew, they could have been satirizing my wandering research paper – maybe even cussing me out. (only kidding !)

That’s when I got serious about finding a way to translate words and whole Web pages from one language or another into English. However, I did not want to have to pay an arm and a leg for software or services to get that done.

Here’s what I found.

To translate a single word or phrase (cut and paste works nicely) , you can use this online translator: http://www.google.com/ig?hl=en&referrer=ign_n (nicknamed "Wordmonkey")

I went online to that translator and plugged in "good article" and asked for its Italian equivalent. It gave me "buon articolo." Then I reversed things. I typed in "buon articolo" and told the program to translate that from Italian back into English. As expected, it popped back with my original phrase, "good article." Happy days, right? Well, not altogether.

Trying to go from English to various other languages that have different ways of writing things, that is, lettering unfamiliar to me (such as Russian, Persian, Chinese, and so on), the translation of "good article" came back written in lettering foreign to me. Not having a handy-dandy phrase written in those alphabets, I couldn’t check to see how they might translate into English. I will assume that you could cut from an unreadable (to me) original, paste it into the box, and out should come a lovely English phrase.

Altogether, that online program is super fast and seems to work well.

Staying with translation programs that are online and at your fingertips, I came across another Google offering, "Google Translate." Google Translate can handle words, text phrases, and whole URL pages, or you can upload offline documents. The number of languages acceptable to the program is very large – you could describe it as almost A to Z.

You will find Google Translate at http://translate.google.com/translate_t# .

I stuck a simple phrase into the box for translation from English to Spanish, "It is necessary for you to have this medicine." That was translated into "Es necesario que usted tiene este medicamento" which, as memory serves me somewhat, is correctly done.

When next I have a bit more time to fiddle around with things, I am going to run that Russian article back in, the one I mentioned earlier. It was a very long article, that one. The first time I tried to translate it, the program handled only about the first one-fourth of the document from its URL page. Perhaps it wants to translate one page at a time. I did not then have the time to check that out, nor do I have enough spare time right at this moment. Tomorrow is another day. Today is the day for trying to make a buck.

The Google people are into the translation game bigtime. They offer a translation program you can download onto your own computer. It is named similarly to their other programs. This one is called Google Translator 2.4. It is about 650KB in size, and it is free. There are actually multiple versions of this downloadable program, each with paired European languages. http://download.chip.eu/en/Google-Translator-2.4_169455.html .

Still another URL to cruise for translators is http://wareseeker.com/free-page-translation . Among all of the other programs described on that page is PROMT Translation Agent 1.0. It is described there as follows:

"PROMT Translation Agent 1.0 offers users a professional free online translation tool easily installed on any PC to provide instant translation for seven European languages - English, German, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian and Russian."

As you can see, there are a number of ways for you to translate Web pages presented in a language foreign to you into a language with which you are familiar. They are easy to use for single words, short phrases, and whole pages and groups of pages, either on the Internet or from local computer files. The price is right, at least for the programs that I have reviewed; that is, they are free to use or to download.

Sprichst du Francais, il mio signore (ou monsieur)? No - nada, aber mille grazi, ahhh – thanks a bunch ! Adios tills nasta gang. (6 different languages ! More than that would make this into an Internet Tower of Babel.)