Comments on: The Internet Lost in Translation http://www.ashleyrichards.com/2005/08/10/the-internet-lost-in-translation/ Fri, 05 Dec 2008 11:08:12 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.6.5 By: Liz Henry http://www.ashleyrichards.com/2005/08/10/the-internet-lost-in-translation/#comment-686 Liz Henry Fri, 28 Jul 2006 01:51:59 +0000 http://www.ashleyrichards.com/?p=61#comment-686 I have been thinking about how to do searches in Spanish or in languages I don't know. August 31 is "Blogday" which is an international effort to blog about blogs outside of your native language, country, or culture. I find that I can get good results if I pick a word in another language, or if a place name, use a smaller town or neighborhood to avoid getting only tourist blogs or Flickr photos. to follow your example "D.F." gets you spanish-speakers but "mexico city" gets tourists - that is somewhat obvious - but you can also try "DF" plus some word in Spanish (I'm always doing "amigas" or "mujeres", "feminismo" or "blogueras", stuff like that) which makes it more likely that you'll get a Spanish-language source. I have the same vision of searching and translating across languages, and flickr would be an ideal place for that... so that if you search on "red" you get photos tagged "rojo" and whatever the equivalent in other languages. Obviously there woudl be huge problems but any elementary set of words would at least provide some level of information... it would be very much worth doing. Maybe a central dictionary-matching tag concept service & API that other web services would subscribe to & use. I have been thinking about how to do searches in Spanish or in languages I don’t know. August 31 is “Blogday” which is an international effort to blog about blogs outside of your native language, country, or culture. I find that I can get good results if I pick a word in another language, or if a place name, use a smaller town or neighborhood to avoid getting only tourist blogs or Flickr photos. to follow your example “D.F.” gets you spanish-speakers but “mexico city” gets tourists - that is somewhat obvious - but you can also try “DF” plus some word in Spanish (I’m always doing “amigas” or “mujeres”, “feminismo” or “blogueras”, stuff like that) which makes it more likely that you’ll get a Spanish-language source.

I have the same vision of searching and translating across languages, and flickr would be an ideal place for that… so that if you search on “red” you get photos tagged “rojo” and whatever the equivalent in other languages. Obviously there woudl be huge problems but any elementary set of words would at least provide some level of information… it would be very much worth doing. Maybe a central dictionary-matching tag concept service & API that other web services would subscribe to & use.

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