Google Translate beats Altavista Babelfish

I wanted to read Marcello’s blog, but I don’t read Italian. He’s a fellow Eclipse on Mac developer who lives in Milan.

So… I tried the good old Babelfish, by Altavista. I entered in Marcello’s blog and chose Italian->English and got redirected. Then I waited… and waited… and I’m still waiting as I write this post. (Update: After several minutes, I just stopped the attempt.)

Then I tried Google Translate, with the same options and got the translation I wanted in under a second.

The translation is quite interesting:

NetNewsWire Lite accidentally gets translated to NetNewsWire Argument :)

My favorite:

“Directly from Wikilab the signalling of the escape of release the 1,0 official of Thunderbird , the client of e-mail open source of Mozilla Foundation .

Perhaps it will not have bannerino ovunque or the page on the New York Times like Firefox , but it is worth the pain sure to try it.”

(BTW, I have tried it and I do like Thunderbird 1.0.)

Even with the so-so translation (which is unfortunately the state of the art), its nice to be able to mostly understand a fellow developer who blogs in Italian, especially when its free and at lightning speed.