Parlez vous Anglais? sprechen sie Englisch?
The other day, a trackback came through that was in Chinese. My natural inclination was to take it as spam and delete it. But curiosity got the better of me and I decided to follow it back and see what it was.
It looked like a blog, but alas it was all Greek to me … or rather, Chinese (though Greek would have been just as unreadable). Using Google’s language tools, I was able to see that it was quite a lively discussion on podcasting. This is a person whose words I want to follow. Unfortunately, there doesn’t seem to be any easy way for me to do so. The best I can hope to do is subscribe to his feed and when a post comes through, seek a translation via Google.
Granted the automatic translation systems are passable, at best, but I find it surprising that translation is not a standard feature for feed readers. Especially surprising is a lack of translation support for Google Reader. Those folks already have all of the language tools in place. Seriously, what would it take to tie the two together?
In the meanwhile, if anyone’s looking for another blog regarding podcasts that’s worth following, I’d direct you to http://www.hopesome.com. Just remember to swing past a translation site on the way.
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March 27th, 2006 at 8:51 am
Oops, so far, it seems Babel Fish (http://world.altavista.com/) is the best translation service we can find on the web.