Përshëndetje and העלא: Our blogs no longer lost in translation

The Tower of Babel

All our German readers now logging on looking for whether the British press identified England’s achilles heel when charting our stumble past the World Cup’s group stage can take heart – for the hard of English amongst you, help is at hand, as it is for all non-English speaking visitors to the Independent’s new(ish) blogs. As of the beginning of this week, we’ve been testing a new feature on the site which provides a handy machine-translated version of all our posts, powered by Google Translate. Douglas Adams’ (or, indeed, Yahoo’s) Babel Fish it ain’t, but it should at least help speakers of Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic or any of the other 49 supported languages get their fix of the Indy’s blogs as quickly and conveniently as possible. Whether you fancy reading Ryan in Russian, Bland in Bulgarian, or Marsden in Macedonian, just look to the right of the headline of any blog article you’re reading, pick a tongue, and sit back and watch Google work its magic. The results, as John Rentoul’s already pointed out, are far from perfect, but they are, we’re hoping, better than nothing.

As ever, all feedback is very greatly appreciated, as are any suggestions for other new features that you’d like to see.

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