AltaVista Updates Its Babel Fish Translation Service

Search Engine AltaVista ( http://www.altavista.com ) has updated its translation service at http://babelfish.altavista.com . Now known as Babel Fish 2000, the site's added several features.

For one, it now additionally translates Russian to English, French to German, and German to French. There's also an international keyboard which allows users to write in six non-English character sets. (To use the keyboard, make sure you have Java enabled, then click on the "World Keyboard" link that's on the upper right part of the translation box. There's a keyboard icon there as well. A new page will pop up, as will a smaller window with a keyboard. Use the pulldown menu to the lower left of the keyboard to specify a language set -- French, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Russian are available, along with a "World" character set as default.

If you don't need the keyboard, just copy-and-paste the text you want translated into the translation box on the main page. (The translation box can accomodate about 800 words.) If you want an entire page translated, use the URL box below the translation box.
In my experience, Web-powered translation services don't come close to providing the value that a human translator does, but if you don't speak a particular language and you just need the "gist" of a page or bit of text, they come in very handy. Worth a look.

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