Digest May Become Multilinqual

I have always been inspired by my competitor _Readers Digest_ which claims to publish in 100 different languages each month, and the _Christian Science Monitor_ which publishes in almost as many. I know in the case of Readers Digest at least, they occupy one large printing machine at Lakeside Press (R.R. Donnelly and Sons) in Chicago some _28_ days per month, 22-plus hours per day putting their magazine together. Millions of issues, in god-knows how many languages; get one issue finished and start on the next one. I have been there and seen the apparatus they print with, it is quite huge.

And the Monitor, for several years now, satellite-transmitted to various printing shops around the world, went for several years with Bruce Sagan in Chicago, publisher of several small publications including _Hyde Park Herald_, the _Southtown Economist_ and a few other small, daily/weekly newspapers in that town. And, he printed the Monitor each day also, but I understand the Chicago Tribune at their 'Freedom Center' on the north side gave the Monitor better terms and could handle more press runs than Bruce Sagan was giving them, so they switched over to Freedom Center; and they (Tribune/Freedom Center) also grabbed the contract for USA Today, so the excess machinery at Freedom Center now does (in addition to Chicago Tribune) the USA Today paper and the Christian Science Monitor.

With that thought in mind, that those guys print in various languages each day, I decided so should TELECOM Digest. I experimented a few years ago (late 1990's) with the Internet Pioneers web site (now it is at

) with multiple languages using the BabelFish translation system but I was not all that impressed with it. Some of you who tested the foreign language translations of those pages using BabelFish said the words generally translated okay, but the _context_ of the words/phrases sometimes left something to be desired. Plus, when using BabelFish I had to put the code on each page and users had to specifically request translation on each page, then it was translation on the fly, not always the best, and it made me look a bit like an idiot also.

But now I think I have a better translation system. It _is_ a machine translation, but it tends to look over an entire page and try to make some sense out of it. It is a system called PROMT, version 7.0. It comes from a company in St. Petersburg, Russia, and although I still do not speak any languages except English and Pig-Latin, what I can make of it is it seems to do a good job. At least if taking away a URL web site page, looking it over for a couple minutes then returning it in the desired language is any indication. The PROMT company is quite interested in teaching people how to read Russian, so Russian is the default language given when you make a selection from the drop down FORM on the top page at

But you are free to choose Russian, French, Portugese, Spanish or German as the language of choice when you make the selection. When you make your alternate language choice, PROMT 'takes the page away', spends anywhere from 30 seconds to a minute or so (depending on the size of the URL) looking it over then returns it back to you supposedly properly translated. It has a hard time (but can sometimes handle) .jpg files. It cannot handle javascript, _but_ whatever language you choose, that language remains in effect on all new pages within the root URL from that point on.

For example, I brought up

and converted it to the various languages, one at a time, sucessfully. Then using the links on that (translated) page, I moved around to various pages of my own -- and as long as I linked elsewhere from a (translated) page, PROMT kept on translating each of those new pages as well. It was a bit slow; each page had to be taken away, examined, and returned a few seconds later translated into my language of choice, without me having to ask it each time to translate something else. To get it to go back to your native tongue, just close the browser and start over.

I would appreciate all of you (who can speak other languages) to please look over the PROMT template at our home page and test it out by moving around to various other pages on our root URL which is

and let me know your findings. I would like to be able to accomodate readers who speak other than English, or who are more comfortable speaking other languages.

Oh ... 'words' we use in English which have no translation (or an otherwise out of context translation such as 'Re:') are ignored, and offset in red. And pages which are 'too long' (for example, some of the newspapers I put in 'td-extra') it just gives up on, and reports that they 'timed out before getting translated'. But some of the pages which seem quite large do make it okay. Play around with it and let me know. Look in the right hand (sponsors) column at the top on the digest web site to find the PROMT box for language translation.

PAT