New online tools translate tweets and entire sites
IJNet columnist Amy Webb has this helpful post that points out ways to make your digital content, including tweets, reach larger audiences.
Webb introduces the Twanslate and ConveyThis translation tools and points out the translate feature of the CoverItLive blogging and chat tool.
While you’re exploring, Google recently announced its own new website translator powered by GoogleTranslate that allows you to make your site’s content instantly available in 51 languages.
At the Knight Center’s Seventh Austin Forum on Journalism in the Americas, Webb challenged all journalists to spend a few minutes checking out as many digital tools as possible, even if they don’t seem useful. These translation tools are worth the time to visit.
Be cautious about automatic translation
Google Translate and other tools are a great resource for a linguistically sophisticated or at least skeptical user, but as a cheap way to reach a general audience they can easily blow up in your face.
A specific example: my employer at one time featured Google Translate links in several languages on one of our websites. The marketing text on our home page read in English, "____ is a graduate program like no other." The translation in Portuguese read, "____ is a graduate program like any other" -- exactly the opposite of our intended meaning.
Or another, even more ridiculous example: when translating texts from Portuguese to English, Google sometimes randomly and inexplicably translates the word "Portugal as "Canada." I'm not kidding.
I frequently use these tools for my own reading, keeping a careful eye out for errors, but I would never use them to communicate my message to others unless I didn't care whether my audience understood me or not.
Important to keep these tools in perspective
Prentiss's comments are obviously valid, these tools can be useful but they must be kept in perspective. Machine translation is long way from replacing human specialist translators (thankfully for me!), and the results are patchy at best. Google translate can sometimes come up with some surprisingly good results with certain types of text, and get it horribly wrong with others, but the most worrying part of this is that sometimes the translation reads fairly well but has got the meaning completely wrong. The trick is obviously to realise the limitations of these tools.
Google Translation
As someone involved on the internet, these translation tools, especially Google's, makes reaching audiences across country borders much easier. The Twitter tools I did not know about, and I'm eager to check them out. I'm sure that for journalism, these tools can prove to be invaluable.
Thanks, rumblepup
Glad you learned something new from reading our blog. Thanks for letting us know!
Dean Graber
Knight Center
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