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Those who have already been through the process of adopting a child from China will, I’m wagering, immediately understand why Google’s latest web thing is so cool. Just take a look:
This is a page from a Chinese music-and-food blog, translated by Google’s new Chinese translator.
That is, it’s a translator that doesn’t do pinyin – it translates written Chinese characters into English sentences. That (more or less) make sense.
Like, here’s the original front page of that blog. And here’s what the writer is actually saying. (Duck’s blood? Um, delicious.)
Why is this remarkable? Well, for one thing, it’s already working better than Babelfish as far as getting something comprehensible out of the original text. One can also directly link to translated pages, making it easier to share translations with friends and family – like documents and announcements and such.
But it’s also Google – and it’s only beta. That means (for those to whom “beta” is all Greek) that it’s still in the early, shake-down phase. Soon, all the kinks will be out – it’ll be even more efficient at making sense out of “as if the street outside in India, the immediate one is a partisan Democrat various spices are placed in the small market” and it’ll be part of a globally recognized system.
In other words, documents on a computer somewhere – say, the China Center for Adoption Affairs‘ matching room, or a local government office, like a Social Welfare Institute – can be immediately read on a computer somewhere else – like an adoption agency headquarters. Or, if you’ve got a gmail.com address, your email inbox.
Which would make referrals that much quicker, along with things like evaluating medical records, researching the city in which your children were born or, if you’re up for it, swapping informal communication with institute workers and foster parents.
I’m not saying anyone is actually planning on doing any of this. I’m just saying it’s becoming awfully *convenient* to do it, and (as things like Google maps & gmail show) when things like this become convenient, they tend to spread rapidly.
Personally, I’m also interested in this thing for another reason – the way you can compare the original text with the translation just by moving your mouse over it. It makes the process of learning characters (or even just recognizing Chinese names for people, buildings and cities) that much easier. All I have to do is move my wrist two inches.
