October 1996

Language translator for dynamic Web pages

It's not hard to support multiple languages at a Web site where all the pages are static files. First you run all the English pages through a bit of translation software. Then you pay a bilingual human to edit the results. (Or you pay the translator to do it right the first time.) It's not cheap, but neither is it rocket science. However, for pages that are dynamically generated from a database, that approach won't work.

Now SciTech Language Partners has arrived. The company is marketing an extensible PageBlazer Web server from Sapphire Group, integrated with the Transcend natural language translator from Transparent Language. The combination translates Web pages on the fly, based on the language preference sent in each HTTP header from the browser. Transcend has modules for several European languages, and its software can be customized with vocabularies for specific industries.

There is also a proxy server version of the PageBlazer-Transcend combo, which means that even if a Web site is not multilingual, your browser can be. SciTech says the technology may soon be extended to translating news feeds, e-mail and databases.

Is it any good? We should note that all machine translators that we have seen are imperfect, especially when dealing with informal phrasing. Technical information is fairly amenable to machine translation, largely because nuances are less important to the overall message. But colloquial writing comes through awkwardly, with the danger of inadvertently creating phrases that have a slang meaning that was not intended.

Nevertheless, given a choice between material in a language that you cannot read and material that you can read, you would probably put up with a bad translation — at least long enough to decide whether to invest in a better translation or find another information source.

A multilingual site that cares about quality will still hire professional translators to write the static portions of its pages. It would then configure PageBlazer to route the dynamically generated information through the machine translation program before merging it with the static portions.

Marketing. SciTech is a marketing organization specializing in scientific and technical computing and in language translation systems. The original integration of the Web server and translation engine was done by Sapphire Group, which continues to provide technical support.

SciTech is not offering any particular price bundles here. Customers simply buy the translation modules and the server licenses they need, obtaining such discounts as each vendor offers. PageBlazer for NT is priced at $745 per server.

SciTech Language Partners
2525 North Elston Ave.
Chicago, IL 60647
Phone (312) 486-9191
Fax (312) 486-9234
www.scitechint.com/scitech/

Sapphire Group
11921 Freedom Drive, Suite 550
Reston, VA 22090
Phone (703) 736-8090
Fax (703) 803-3527
www.sapphiregroup.com