Translate TolkienGuide now available
On the left menu bar of TCG pages you now have a small widget that will translate the current page you are on into one of a wide variety of languages supported by Google Translate. The service is far from perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but for those of you for whom English is not your primary language, you can get an idea of what is being discussed in a language more to your preference.
Of note, once you have translated a TCG page into another language, there are two tricks that will help you get the most out of the tool. First, you can move your mouse over a sentence and the translator script will offer the original English sentence to compare with - quite useful when the translation ends up getting mangled due to misunderstandings by the software. Secondly, if you want to return the page to English, just click the "show original" button at the top of the page (or close the Google toolbar entirely) and the page will be restored to English.
Do let me know in the comments if there are serious technical issues this new script causes with site navigation or page loads. I can't help with silly translations, however - we will have to take those to Google and see what they can do for us.
Many thanks to Jason over at Lingwë for pointing this tool out!
February 24, 2010 @ 10:45 am
Whenever I use to translate to Dutch I get to see some very smart Denglish... but no Dutch that is for sure!
February 24, 2010 @ 10:49 am
Agreed, I think this is mostly useful for getting a general sense, or perhaps a few words in a different language. Full sentences still seem a bit beyond the tool's capability, and probably will remain so.
The best translation tool is native speakers doing the work - for example, how Facebook and wikipedia do it with volunteers. I don't think TCG has enough static content for this to be a useful approach yet, though.