There is a fine line between news and entertainment on a new Web site that translates hundreds of the world's newspapers into English. Consider this headline translated from The Beijing Daily: "Sells which roast the dried bean curd girl." From The Okinawa Times comes this gripping lead: "The light where the body of the strong so stainless steel material is sluggish is shot."
Those are samples of "gist level" translations by Newstran. com (www.newstran.com). The three-month-old site, created by Rick Perez, links to AltaVista's free translation service, named Babel Fish. Babel Fish, which uses dictionary software from Systran, was the first such online translation service when it appeared in late 1997; today it supports 19 language pairs.
As a result, Newstran.com can translate newspapers into English from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. (It also can translate English-language newspapers into any of these languages.) Whether or not readers will understand the result is another matter. At the very least it takes some patience to muddle through the babble.
"Sure, it stumbles on slang and idioms, but you can get the gist of most things," said Perez, who runs an advertising and public relations. "I wouldn't base any major business or life decisions on what you read here."
To be fair, Asian languages are the most difficult for computers to translate into English. French and Spanish newspapers tend to be the most readable; a few attempts at German-into-English were laughable and resulted in Spiegel Online headlines like "Single dumps from the telex."
While Newstran.com may not be perfect, it can still be useful. The ability to translate Web sites (news or otherwise) is increasingly important in a world where an estimated 400 million people are communicating and conducting business online of which 53 percent speak something other than English as their native language.
Perez say his main goal is to open the world's media to all readers -- especially those without access to a free press. "It's more of a crusade than a business project," said Perez, who finances the site through his nonprofit organization Humanitas International. "I'm going to put every dime I have into this to make it successful."
Perez may be headed for some legal trouble, however, because of the way his site works. When a user calls up a newspaper for translating, the newspaper site is contained within a frame and is surrounded by Newstran advertisements.
The New York Times Co, for one, has sent a "cease and desist" letter to Perez. The Times Co's legal department "will follow up if the illegal framing and unauthorized use of The New York Times' content is not stopped," a company spokeswoman said.
Perez said he was not trying to steal any traffic from newspapers. He doesn't want to take The New York Times on the Web off the site, but isn't sure what he will do. "According to my attorneys, I'm not violating any laws," he said. "We're a nonprofit organization providing a service."
Aside from any legal problems, professional translators say that Newstran may be spreading itself too thin by trying to translate so many newspapers between so many languages.
"The problem with a general-purpose site is that there's no such thing as a general-purpose language," said Rose Lockwood, director of research at Berlitz GlobalNET, a subsidiary of Berlitz International.
Systran, the company that provides the dictionary software for Babel Fish and, by extension, Newstran.com, is a pioneer in the realm of machine translation, but its system works best when customized. As ragged as the newspaper translations are, they will only improve as Babel Fish expands its vocabulary. Unknown words are added to the dictionaries, so the longer it is used, the better it gets.
"We're only in our infancy," Perez said. "As computers get faster and smarter, the translations will get more precise."
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