Translations

Website : Translations : Übersicht
23-Oct-2002/09-Jan-06

Overview

The language of the Internet and the Free Software movement is English, so the website is mostly in English.

This website is currently also available in eleven languages which are being translated automatically:

1. Arabic (by Areeb Tarjim),
2. Chinese (by Altavista Babel Fish),
3. French (by Google),
4. German (by Google),
5. Italian (by Google),
6. Japanese (by Altavista Babel Fish),
7. Korean (by Altavista Babel Fish),
8. Norwegian (by FreeTranslation.com),
9. Portuguese (by Google),
10. Russian (by PROject MT),
11. Spanish (by Google).

As of the time of this writing (25-Oct-2002), all translation services were online and delivered readable results; if you're interested how the Tark website looks in Chinese or in one of the other translated languages, take a look at the Screenshots.

If you're looking the the I18l support in The Tark: see section I18n.

Why automatic translations?

Automatic translations are necessary since nobody is able to translate work in progress to all relevant languages.

This makes sense, even if the automatic translations are far from perfect, since there are many countries where not everybody is able to read technical documents in English; this is especially true for the countries of the so-called third word, where Spanish, Portuguese, Arabic, and Chinese are widespread; for Russia, China and the eastern part of Germany, where older people hadn't the opportunity to learn English; and for France and Italy, where the native languages are usually preferred by the French and Italian people.

Possible extensions

It is possible to extend this and to provide at least 15 automatic translations from an English source URL using free web services like

• Google (German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese),
• Altavista Babel Fish (French, German, Italian, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese Spanish) using Systran technology,
• FreeTranslation.com ("Transparent Language") by SDL International (English, French, German, Italian, Norwegian, Portuguese),
• PROject MT (French, German, Russian, Spanish),
• Areeb Tarjim (Arabic),
• Arcnet (Indonesian, Thai, Malaysian, Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Japanese, Korean) etc.

Some of these services are rather slow or unreliable; sometimes they don't work at all; most of them use on-free (speech) or proprietary software, but all of them are currently free (beer). And, of course, the translations are quite raw, but mostly understandable (and better than nothing).

An example for this is the language switch at Kefk Network P2P which uses these services to provide 15 automatically translated versions from the German "source" website.

Future plans

Later, when the major parts of the website's content are rather complete, there will be most probably real translations (at the moment this doesn't make sense yet).