Yahoo! Hacks

Translate Any Page with Yahoo!

The World Wide Web has pages in every language, and Yahoo! can help you break through the language barrier.

Because the Web is a global space, we’ve all come across pages in different languages, especially among search results. If you’re searching for information about a phrase like hamburger recipe, it’s strange to come across a page about it in German. It’s stranger still to find a mention of your name on a page in a foreign language. Imagine my surprise when I was searching Yahoo! for my name and found it at the Russian site shown in Figure 1-10.

Figure 1-10. Russian text with my name (Paul Bausch)

I can’t read Russian, so of course I had no idea what the text said. I had recently added a photo gallery of old radio dials to my web site; I could tell they were linking to it, but I wanted to know what they were saying.

Yahoo! Language Tools

Yahoo!’s Language Tools page (http://tools.search.yahoo.com/language) has some ways to help you work with other languages. Among them is a translation service that will translate any block of text to a different language. I copied the Russian text from Figure 1-10, pasted it into the text area labeled “Translate this web text,” chose “From Russian to English” from the drop-down list of languages, and clicked Translate. Yahoo! responded with this:

Radio Dials. The gallery of the photographs of ancient, I will not be ...