Babylon 8: On-the-Fly Translation of Words and Web Pages

Many people who manage web sites, blogs and web applications wrestle with the job of translating text to other languages, as discussed here. Babylon has long been a widely used tool for doing on-the-fly translations of words, text strings and entire web pages. It’s now out in a new version 8, which you can download and try for free here. (If you like it, you have to pay $99 to keep it.) I’ve been using it, and although no translation software is perfect, I find it good for both simple translation needs when writing, and for on-the-fly definitions.

After downloading Babylon (for Windows Vista and XP), you can select any word on a web page, in a PDF, in an email or in most popular applications, hold down your Ctrl button, then right-click your mouse to get a definition and translations. For example, in the screenshot to the right, I’ve selected the text “copyright infringement” from a news story on the web, hit the Ctrl key, and right-clicked to get a definition. I can scroll down in the list of results to get translations to other languages, and get results from Wikipedia and other sources. For the word “infringement,” I was able to pull up definitions from The ‘Lectric Law Library and the U.S. Patent Office — an impressive example of how Babylon considers the context for the definitions it provides.

In the screenshot here, you can see Babylon’s French translation of the word “emissions”:

Along the row of small icons at the bottom of the screenshot above, the second one (it looks like a globe) is the tool you use when you want to translate an entire web page to another language. You just click it, enter the URL of the page you want translated, and the translated text comes back formatted on the web page. For example, here is WebWorkerDaily’s Box.net story from yesterday with an Arabic translation:

I speak enough French to know that most of the French translations that Babylon did were fairly accurate, but you’ll want to check results for specific languages that you know. Babylon can handle translations to most widely spoken languages, but it’s worth remembering that almost all auto-translation software tools make mistakes. In most cases, if you’re going to publish results from them, you’ll want to check the accuracy.

I do like how Babylon will translate an entire web page and retain the formatting of the original version, though. That could be especially useful if you collaborate with someone online who speaks another language. Google Translate does a pretty good job of that as well, and it’s free, but with Babylon you get translations on the fly, wherever you are online, and you get extras such as definitions.

Have you tried Babylon? How effective was the translation for you?

loading

Comments have been disabled for this post