Linking to Foreign Language Sites using Babelfish Translation
So you are setting up a links page and one or more of the sites that you want to link to is in a foreign language. This doesn't stop you from providing the link. It just makes the link less useful to anyone who doesn't understand the language that the site is written in.
There is a solution available for at least some languages. There are a number of services available on the internet that will provide computer generated translations of foreign language phrases and even entire web sites. The computer generated translations are not perfect but they are much better than nothing and give you a general idea at least of what a site is about.
One of these services is called 'Babelfish'.
To create a translation link to www.website.com, instead of specifying
<a href="http://www.website.com">
you specify
<a href="http://babel.altavista.com/translate_dyn?urltext=http://www.website.com/&lp=xx_yy">
where 'xx' is the language to translate from and 'yy' the language to translate to. Don't forget to substitute the name of the website that you want to link to for www.website.com in the above link.
The value for 'xx_yy' can be any of the following:
- 'en_fr' to translate English to French
- 'en_es' to translate English to Spanish
- 'en_de' to translate English to German
- 'en_it' to translate English to Italian
- 'en_pt' to translate English to Portuguese
- 'fr_en' to translate French to English
- 'de_en' to translate German to English
- 'it_en' to translate Italian to English
- 'pt_en' to translate Portuguese to English
- 'es_en' to translate Spanish to English
- 'de_fr' to translate German to French
- 'fr_de' to translate French to German
- 'ru_en' to translate Russian to English
- 'en_ja' to translate English to Japanese
- 'en_ko' to translate English to Korean
- 'en_zh' to translate English to Chinese
- 'ja_en' to translate Japanese to English
- 'ko_en' to translate Korean to English
- 'zh_en' to translate Chinese to English
Several of these translation languages have been added since I first came across the service so if the combination that you want is not listed then it might be with checking to see if Babelfish have added it.
To see the translation effect in action, here is a direct link to the French Railways website which is written (obviously) in French, and here is a link to the Babelfish translation of the same site.
For more information about Babelfish take a look at their Translation Help page.
