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The Web Brings Together People and Languages
November 24, 2001
David Walter
Since September 11, news sources on the Internet have become very popular destinations.
CNN, the New York Times, the BBC and the Globe and Mail are just a handful of news organizations that have experienced massive influxes of Web surfers seeking the latest breaking stories and developments. It's become a daily routine for news hounds to see what everybody is saying-cross-referencing stories in an attempt to see through journalistic biases.
This search for knowledge has also uncovered for myself and many others a very powerful tool available on the Internet-on-line language translations.
I fielded a question recently by a library patron looking to find a famous Middle East news source on the Web.
Aljazeera, dubbed the "CNN of the Middle East" has emerged as a crucial news outlet for middle eastern nations, and has been getting a lot of press lately in western media for their role in the current conflicts. Located in the progressive and oil-rich United Arab Emirates, Aljazeera is a satellite news channel which broadcasts its programming in Arabic to the Middle East-a region of the world where news is often censored by governments.
Aljazeera is important to the Arabic world because it is an uncensored news source. It is interesting to us because it allows us to see the spin that a credible middle eastern media outlet is giving to the "War on Terrorism", allowing us the ability to take a critical look at the spin our media is giving to the stories.
There is one problem though. Aljazeera's web site (www.aljazeera.net) is in Arabic.
Since the number of folks in Oxford County who can read Arabic is limited, we realized that we needed to find a way around the language barrier, so we turned to one of the web's most interesting tools: on-line translators.
Wanting to read the Aljazeera site, we needed to find an Arabic translator. The site we found is located at http://tarjim.ajeeb.com. It appears in Arabic, however in the right hand corner of the page there is a link that says "English Site"-we clicked on that and entered the world of Arabic language information.
It asks you to select a user name and password, but the process doesn't take long, and the information that you gain access to is well worth the effort. From there we log in, type www.aljazeera.net in the "Translate" box, and within seconds we were able to read the Arabic language news site with ease.
Beyond our example of Arabic-to-English translations, there are many on-line tools available to translate any language you can think of.
One such site is www.foreignword.com. It offers 69 different languages that you can translate to and from.
Want to translate an article that you found on a Dutch web site into English? No problem. Copy and paste the text into the "translate" box, press the button, and it will generate the English translation. This can also be done for an English-to-Dutch translation.
Be aware though, although very good, such services aren't perfect. Certain elements may be interpreted wrong or translated into a format that may be out of context. If light bulbs are going off in your heads about making your French homework a little bit easier, think again.
I've just outlined a couple of services here, however there are many more. Just go to a search engine such as google.com, type in a search for "translations", and find a service that you feel comfortable with.
David Walter is a Community Access Program Web Team member operating from the Ingersoll branch of the Oxford County Library.
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