[South Florida DX Association] Machine translation

[Bill Marx]

Besides Babelfish, another popular language translation tool is Google's,
http://www.google.com/language_tools?hl=en .

It will translate text you supply, translate an entire web page from a URL
you supply, or even search across languages -- so, for example, you can give
it a Hindi search phrase and it will find web pages written in Korean that
are relevant to that phrase.

Of course, all the limitations of machine translation apply; Bill's right in
saying that such tools are probably good for QSL phrases, or to get the gist
of a text, but not for authoritative or critical applications.

A particular failure mode of machine translation I hadn't previously
considered appeared when I asked it to translate a German page dealing with
a man named Schönen.  It turns out that "schönen" means "beautiful" in
German, so the translated text was littered with references to "Mr.
Beautiful"....

Ed Callaway N4II