Tuesday, October 21, 2003
A bit more on that translation service
My friend Lorie, who is wise in the ways of translations as she speaks French, Spanish, and Italian (a bit) in addition to English, responded to my translation spam I received:
I just read your entry about Babel Fish Translations.
5 bucks a month for 8 languages would have been my first clue that they weren't legit. At my current job, interpreters garner about 30-40 bucks an hour … 2 hour minimum.
Overseas, depending on where you go those costs can increase to 300-400 bucks (case in point, we needed someone for Poland and in that's what our Singapore office quoted us).
For Translation services … the average cost is about .59 a word …
Oh … by the by …
The French and Spanish versions aren't so hot. They look “Angla-cized.”
Well, you can get nearly every page translated for free at Babelfish (although there is a limit to the size of the page) and once a page is translated (for a static site like Conman Laboratories you don't really need a monthly update (well, some pages yes, but overall the site doesn't change all that much).
Plus, Apache can be configured to automatically serve up the appropriage pages based on langauge in a user's browser (as part of the content negotiation process in HTTP); there is no real need to offer links to other languages, except perhaps as a curtesy for broken or misconfigured browsers.
![[The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades]](https://www.conman.org/people/spc/about/2023/1023.t.jpg "The future's so bright, I gotta wear shades")