I have been following the campaign for the election of the Director General in the media, and it has been fascinating. Indeed, I have created a separate blog to provide people with links to the information I have been finding as well as information on the election process and the candidates biographies.
I have also been posting a lot of the news about the election on the
Not surprisingly, since UNESCO is an international organization, the press coverage of the election is in many languages. So far, in addition to English, I have found materials in French, Spanish, Portuguese, German, Italian, Bulgarian, Russian, Arabic, Greek and Ukranian. In part I have been able to do so because Google Alerts are able to search these languages and inform me when materials are published online relating to the election.
The problem is that while I read English, Spanish, French and Portuguese, and can make out the gist of things written in Italian, I don't have the other languages. I was using Babel Fish for translation but it does not have all of the language pairs provided by Google translate. So I have been using Google for translation, and discover that it also has a translated search function which is great.
Of course, I am not equally fluent in the languages I can read, and I find it necessary to look up words fairly frequently in some of them. I find I am using Google translate to do rough translations of paragraphs or even whole articles. The translations are really very helpful.
I have been surprised at how polished the translations from Russian appear, not to mention that there are tools to translate from Bulgarian and Ukranian to English. Even the rough Arabic translations are sufficient to let me understand the content of articles.
It is rather wonderful to have such immediate and useful access to information in so many languages! Thanks Google!
No comments:
Post a Comment