Tzvee Likes the Google Translation Machine

We found traffic to our blog coming from a European blog called Lucerna wikipedie. So to find out what they were saying about us we turned to Google Translate. There we were told to "Enter text or a webpage URL."

The neat choice that I found recently is "Detect language" - the first on the source drop-down menu on the Google Translate page. In the case of the blog in question, I did not originally detect myself that the blog was written in Czech - so the automatic detection was more useful than trial and error.

In some languages the translation engine is not especially thorough and I suspect not entirely accurate. Certainly the style of the translated result lacks fluidity. But for my purposes it is usually fine. I'm curious to know how people use my blog posts. In particular I want to see if antisemites are misusing content that we post, not that there is anything we can do about that, to paraphrase the famed Jerry Seinfeld qualifier.

The link in this case is from a Czech Wikipedia centric blog to our Tzvee's Talmudic Blog post regarding Timothy Geithner, where we established by our own independent research that contrary to information that had been posted in Wikipedia, he is not Jewish.

While we were on the subject - we have added the Google Translate gadget to our blog. It's on the side in the right hand column of every page now.--->

This makes our webpage instantly available in other languages, it offers instant access to automatic translations of our content.

It's nice to see the blog in Hebrew! Try it.......--->

Also try the Google "Translated Search" page, available as one of the tabs at Google Translate.

That's a facility that is a bit more complex. It offers some promising assistance. In a rare case of technical writing Google actually tries to explain what "Translated Search" does for you as follows:

How does this work?
1. Search for Dubai tours from English to Arabic.
2. We translate your query into "جولات دبي" and find Arabic web page results.
3. Finally, we translate the Arabic web page results back into English for you.

Other things you can search for
St. Petersburg restaurants - (Санкт-Петербург рестораны) in Russian pages
Beijing apartments - (北京公寓) in Chinese pages