Translation sites open the Web up to the world

There are literally billions of pages of information on the World Wide Web. The vast majority of them are in English. Studies indicate that as much as 75 percent of the world pages are in English.

Globally around 375 million people speak English as their first language and another billion or so use it as a second language.  This means that three quarters of the world’s population cannot read three quarters of the web pages available to them.

Fortunately there are sites to help. One is called Babel Fish. The site is part of Yahoo and can be found at http://babelfish.yahoo.com. The site offers a number of ways to translate web pages into the language of the reader. Sites like Babel Fish go along ways towards make all web resources available to all people.

Unfortunately some countries, including China, limit what sites their citizens can see by blocking ones that they feel are critical to the government.

Translations possible on Babel Fish.

Chinese-simp to English
Chinese-simp to Chinese-trad
Chinese-trad to English
Chinese-trad to Chinese-simp
English to Chinese-simp
English to Chinese-trad
English to Dutch
English to French
English to German
English to Greek
English to Italian
English to Japanese
English to Korean
English to Portuguese
English to Russian
English to Spanish
Dutch to English
Dutch to French
French to Dutch
French to English
French to German
French to Greek
French to Italian
French to Portuguese
French to Spanish
German to English
German to French
Greek to English
Greek to French
Italian to English
Italian to French
Japanese to English
Korean to English
Portuguese to English
Portuguese to French
Russian to English
Spanish to English
Spanish to French