One click – and the World suddenly got small

One of the most annoying barriers between people is the language barrier. I have for the last 20 years been struggling with learning a number of new languages for study or professional reasons. The most recent – and by far the most difficult – was to try to learn Arabic. In spite of a serious effort I failed miserably.

I don’t like that – and I don’t like to have to bother other people by asking them to help me translating. But then a couple of months ago I made the discovery of the year – at least for me. I have never experienced such an increase in productivity and understanding as when I stumbled upon the Google Language Tools. Basically, it is a very versatile machine translator to and from many, many different languages.

My previous experience with machine translation has not been good. They are generally cumbersome and inflexible. But this machine is something else. It is like a new world that suddenly opens up from being encrypted and hidden from your sight. Of course it is far from perfect depending on the language – I wouldn’t sign a business contract based on its translation – but it gives you a good feeling of the main points in a story. And then it works directly on complete homepages and it is intelligent as well. If you’re not satisfied with the quality of the output you can suggest better translations which the machine uses to improve itself.

I have tried the machine on a number of different languages. My main use is for translating Arabic texts and web pages into English. It is ok at that – but at times it leaves you a bit confused because of the very different grammatical structures in the two languages. And it is too efficient. Arabic names often have a specific meaning – so when talking about people you have to figure out by yourself who they are – as in “Captain Golden” (Prime Minister Dahabi…). But the main point is, that what was used to be hidden is now visible to all. By the way – try to translate the Ammon news version of His Majesty’s interview into english and see what you get…

A hint: When translating between European languages it is a good idea to translate into a language in the same family like Italian to French or Dutch to German if you read those languages. On average the translation into English is good and from Danish to English on individual text pieces it is very good. So no more excuses for not knowing what is written in Denmark…

On this blog I have made a new link category with my favourite Jordanian sites in Arabic. If you pick one of those links you should get the English translation. Not all websites are programmed to do that – but these should work (I hope). Please post a comment if you feel that there are important Jordanian (political issues) sites in Arabic that needs to be checked out.