Parlez-vous Internet?

Posted on 2 Jul 2002 at 17:35

If you can't speak the Net lingo, don't worry, as Davey Winder has all the answers - in good old plain English.

As the Internet becomes a truly global medium, problems over language will crop up. No longer can we assume that every Web site we visit will be in English - not even that quaint version of it that's used in the US. I've often followed a link from a search engine that looks ideal, only to discover that the information is in German, Swedish and even Japanese. Multilingual dictionaries offer a good first step, especially if you have some grasp of the language concerned, and fortunately there are a few good examples on-line. A quick visit to the Online Dictionaries and Translators site (http://rivendel. com/~ric/resources/dictionary. html) will provide you with direct links to just about all the most likely language-to-language combinations. Actually, there are some dictionaries linked to this site that are quite unlikely, such as Mandinka-to-English or Rasta/Patois-to-Russian.

Of course, if you don't know the language being used at all, you could be stuck. I say could be, because if you pop along to the Language Identifier engine (http://www.cs. cmu.edu/~dougb/ident.html) and enter a sample of the text it will attempt to tell you what it is. However, none of this will help when you have a Web site full of information that you don't understand, and don't have the time to translate every single word, one at a time, using a dictionary.

The solution is out there, though, in the unlikely shape of Digital's Alta Vista search engine. Provided you only need to translate between various combinations of English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish (at the time of writing), then the Alta Vista Systran translation service is the place to go. It's free of charge and simple to use, yet it works in a perfectly acceptable manner. While its translations - so I've been told by a linguist friend of mine - are often basic, they're readable and make sense. Obviously, much technical jargon (often used on the Net) is going to get lost along the way, so bear this in mind when using it, and remember that if this translation is a matter of business life or death then you'd be an idiot not to shell out the money to get a proper job done.

The Systran translation service greets you with a simple entry box into which you can type the confusing words or, as I've discovered, cut and paste foreign language HTML straight off the page. Select the particular translation you require from a drop-down menu, hit the Translate button and 'la é, imediatamente' - which Alta Vista tells me is 'there it is, immediately' in Portuguese.

Mapping your Web

'Don't get caught with your links down' is the LinkScan motto, and it should become a mantra for all Webmasters, in my not-at-all humble opinion. Given that an estimated 30 per cent of all external links on the Internet are broken at any one time, creating many missing files and orphaned files, it should come as no surprise when you see that dreaded 'unable to open the site' or 'file not found' error message. While people for whom their home page is only a hobby may be forgiven for not spending hours every week checking through their links, those for whom the Internet means business deserve no mercy - and, of course, it's these very folk who have the most difficulty in tracking down the broken links. It can be difficult enough, and immensely time-consuming, to validate all the internal links on a large site, let alone going out over the Internet and checking other peoples sites as well. This is where an automatic link validator comes in.