Buttons for Translation Service

translate your pages with a click of a button,
simply cut&paste the JavaScript from this page:

http://www.art-bag.net/trans.htm 

In order to make efficient use of the translation service 
provided by AltaVista and SYSTRAN's:
http://babelfish.altavista.digital.com/
(let's hope this will remain free of charge and will 
be funded by advertisement via the page) I wrote some 
simple JavaScript form tags. 

currently available:
-  Spanish to English, English to Spanish
-  French to English, English to French
-  German  to English, English to German
-  Portuguese to English, English to Portuguese
-  Italian to English, English to Italian

This should allow content providers to place buttons on 
their web page to make their content accessible in other 
languages. The JavaScript is designed for 'cut&paste'. 
Take the form scripts and paste them in any page (no 
adjustment needed). Just cut out the desired translation 
button and paste it in your HTML code. 

Little problems I encountered: 

- the translation seems to stop at some point - might just 
  be a test phase??? 
- if you link locally on your pages (../*.html) it gets a bit 
  confused. However, if you put the complete URLs in the source 
  code you will end up with a perfect mirror page which is fully 
  linked to your home page (including pictures et al).

I am sure that the business value of this service will be 
interesting, but I feel even stronger, that this service will 
allow to make much more efficient use of the 
narrow-cast publishing tool at hand - the www. I really 
hope that this service will remain free of charge, for it allows 
many pages to drastically open up their content... 

Being based in Europe I hope Eastern European languages will be 
included into the service at some point (being fully aware of the 
linguistic challenge to leap into a different lingo source 
altogether...) 

[you will find the code for these buttons by looking at the 
source code of this page: http://www.art-bag.net/trans.htm] 

However, for some reason the CGI translation sometimes crashes... 
I can't tell if it's due to the script or the CGI service. So 
test run the pages - and keep the number of buttons low. Alternatively 
you might want to use the select menu (see below). It worked fine,
then it didn't - then it did - then it didn't... if anybody has
any suggestions, please tell me...

All the best and hope this is of any use. Feel free to distribute and use 
the script - however, I can't speak for the service from AltaVista ;) 

Yours,

Micz Flor (micz@xxxxxxxxxxxx)

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[t/f]+44.171.7395331 [t]+44.161.2956157 [a]http://www.art-bag.net
[b]http://www.icf.de/workspace [c]http://www.metamute.com
[q]"There is no administrative production of meaning."
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