A few day ago, I noticed this Russian blog entry which used one of my photos of Montserrat. When adding the link to Delicious I commented that it would be good if could read Russian so that I understood what was being said.
(Another) Dave reminded me that Google has a translation service which claims to do Russian to English translations. So I tried it, and the results were really pretty good.
City after volcanic eruptionIn summer 1995, in one of the islands in the Caribbean eruption occurred. As a result, Plymouth city was almost completely filled ash. A layer of ash in a half meters.
In the town of 4000 people lived, and was the capital of the island. Clear solidified lava flows and ash was too expensive. The capital is moved to another city. A Plymouth declared a zone of exclusion.
The single comment just says "terrible". Of course the translation isn't perfect. But it's a lot better than I expected it to be.
Thought this article might be interesting:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/05/15/google_translation/
"Last summer, Google took top honors at a bake-off competition sponsored by the American agency NIST between machine-translation engines, besting IBM in English-Arabic and English-Chinese. The crazy part is that no one on the Google team even understands those languages...."
Surely the Google engineers understand English?
Another related thing is that Google offer IM bots that will do yoru translations:
http://googlesystem.blogspot.com/2007/12/translation-service-for-google-talk.html
Which leaves me wondering how long before someone creates an IM proxy that does the translation on the fly. I'd write in English, you'd write in French and we'd both see the other's replies in our native tounge.
Murray.
ps. (Twice now) I cannot make registering on this blog work, hence the aol openid.