I saw Joel Parish’s Ajax Translator on Ajaxian last week. It’s an on-the-fly Ajax application that creates real-time translations between English, Spanish, German, Italian, Portuguese and French. Very slick.
Ajax Translator, like Babel Fish, is useful for crude communication that translates one word at a time or that has the same grammatical structure in both language, but it does not allow for grammatical inconsistencies. For more complicated communications the back end quickly falls behind.
The front end is cool though. 
typo alert.
i guess it also translates portuguese…
Yes, it is cool. But doesn’t really work. The English to German translations are extermely poor.
The backend seems to be translate.google.
this is cool, but the real killer app for translation would be realtime translation for IM conversations…I keep getting all these random chatters from South America an Europe that I can’t freak’n understand!
pretty cool but the truetranslation killer app would be realtime IMtranslation..I get all hese random chatters from South America and Europe and I can’t understand a damn thing they say
wtf is up w/ the comments, none of mine seem to be posting…if theres some kind of delay I aplogize for the multple posts…
The developer, Joel Parish, is 15 years old. Well done, Joel!
http://parish.ath.cx/
CHEERS!
David
Josh - yes, this is one of the bugs with wordpress 2.0 - everything is considered spam.
At first it looks like a nice application but you can’t do a word to word translation between languages. Try typing in “throw it in the trash can” and you’ll see that “trash” and “can” are translated seperately instead as one word.
That being said it is kinda nifty and if there was a way for it to correct itself based on the grammatical structure of the sentence it would be extremely useful.
It is surely a quick way for translating a given text, but I also prefer some facilities to translate a url directly (like dragging the url from browser address bar to a part where it is automatically translated)
Very cool. I believe the real killer app is RSS translations. Tempting to write on my own, would be quite easy to hook into a translation API and transform an RSS feed.
No, no, the real killer app is a translation tool that just sits in the desktop. You select a word, a sentence or a url and it translates it on the spot, and does a good job at it. It already exists, and it’s called Babylon. Unfortunately, it’s not free (anymore) and that’s why it’s not web2.0 and not huge.
Of course, some smart developer could do something similar (any 15 year old can plug in to a free API) as a google widget, apple widget, opera widget, a FireFox extension, and a Vista widget, so that almost anyone could use it.