All Your Base Are Belong to Us (babelfish.altavista.com)

Member Name: seacow

Product:	babelfish.altavista.com
Date:	23/06/02 (74 review reads)
Rating:

Advantages: Easy to use, wide variety of languages

Disadvantages: doesn't always work

I?m sure everyone?s seen or heard of that clip referred to in the title that shows what happens when the average person takes translation into his or her own hands. Professional translators know what they?re doing; those who have used Babelfish know the value of getting such a translator.

I?ve been able to use it to talk to a Spanish-speaker over ICQ. She said I was speaking perfect Spanish, although I?ll never know because I don?t speak the language myself. The problem came mostly in translating her words into English. She didn?t use characters found in Spanish such as é and ñ, probably because they weren?t on her keyboard and she didn?t know how to get them. This made translating words such as mañana difficult. (Even if manana is a word in Spanish, it won?t have the same meaning.)

Then, there are cases where I?d translate something into German and translate it back to English. I?d often get sentences similar to the title of this review. (Several other people here have written about similar experiences.) I don?t know why one translation works so well, but translating both ways trips up the site. It might have something to do with the nuances of German. Maybe the person that programmed German into the database was having a bad day. I guess we?ll never really know.

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