* * * * *

                    A bit more on that translation service

My friend Lorie, who is wise in the ways of translations as she speaks
French, Spanish, and Italian (a bit) in addition to English, responded to my
translation spam [1] I received:

> I just read your entry about Babel Fish Translations.
>
> 5 bucks a month for 8 languages would have been my first clue that they
> weren't legit. At my current job, interpreters garner about 30-40 bucks an
> hour … 2 hour minimum.
>
> Overseas, depending on where you go those costs can increase to 300-400
> bucks (case in point, we needed someone for Poland and in that's what our
> Singapore office quoted us).
>
> For Translation services … the average cost is about .59 a word …
>
> Oh … by the by …
>
> The French and Spanish versions aren't so hot. They look “Angla-cized.”
>

Well, you can get nearly every page translated for free at Babelfish [2]
(although there is a limit to the size of the page) and once a page is
translated (for a static site like Conman Laboratories [3] you don't really
need a monthly update (well, some pages yes, but overall the site doesn't
change all that much).

Plus, Apache [4] can be configured to automatically serve up the appropriage
pages based on langauge in a user's browser (as part of the content
negotiation process in HTTP (HyperText Transport Protocol)); there is no real
need to offer links to other languages, except perhaps as a curtesy for
broken or misconfigured browsers.

[1] gopher://gopher.conman.org/0Phlog:2003/10/20.3
[2] http://babel.altavista.com/
[3] http://www.conman.org/
[4] http://httpd.apache.org/

Email author at [email protected]

You are viewing proxied material from gopher.conman.org. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.