AltaVista's Babel Fish Learns New Languages

AltaVista announced yesterday that their translation engine, available at http://babelfish.altavista.com, now supports Asian language characters and offers translation of Chinese, Japanese, and Korean. (Both traditional and simplified Chinese are supported.)

If you're thinking, "My browser doesn't support Asian language characters, so this is irrelevant to me" -- it's not. Remember, with Babel you can cut and paste the URL of a page to be translated. So if you find a Japanese page via a search engine, cut and paste the URL into Babel Fish and read it that way. Two caveats: 1) Machine translation is not perfect. You'll get the gist but sometimes that's all you'll get. 2) Be sure to include http:// on the URL. The 'Fish, in my experiments, considered an URL without an http:// to be "malformed." 
 

Posted to Search Engines-AltaVista