If it's wrong, I've probably said it...
No, really, it's Japanese
Published on August 13, 2004 By chiprj In Blogging
I was doing some random google'ing and I came across a link for JU that had Japanese written with the link. When I clicked on it, it took me to an excite.jp webpage that had everything in JU in english with Japanese written right below it. Now, I don't know Japanese at all, but I can recognize some Chinese characters (Korean and Japanese both use Chinese characters) and what I could recognize seemed to fit. For example, I saw the character for year in the title of article about the 15 year HS reunion. Could be an automatic translator, which would key in on key words, so year, month, day (all characters I can recognize) would appear correctly, but can't make up for grammar, slang, or idiomatic phrases. It looks fairly up to date, so I gotta figure this is the case. I can't believe that excite.co.jp would have a staff of translators just sitting there waiting for us to post articles/comments. I think I'm gonna have one of the other MLI's look it over, though. He speaks and reads Japanese. If he can shed some light on the accuracy of the translations, I'll pass it on.

Anyone know anything about this? Anyone have a link to excite.kr doing the same thing (I am going to search and if I find it, I'll check the translation myself)? The link is here: Link. Check it out!

First Update: This has gotta be an automatic translation program (which means it's not going to be overly accurate), because this article was updated and translated within three minutes.

Comments
on Aug 13, 2004
Hmm...that's kind of strange...I wonder why the people would take the trouble to translate a blog site of all things....hmmm....

~Zoo
on Aug 13, 2004
I could only access part of it . . . that's insane . . . it's like looking in a mirror with another mirror behind you . . . oooooo . . . freaky.
on Aug 13, 2004
I think it is a translation bot. I've also seen that by clicking on my webpage link, it's translated when it loads. I also tried clicking on kangmi.org in my blogroll list and it translated all the English there, but didn't translate the Korean into Japanese.

I wonder why the people would take the trouble to translate a blog site of all things


Well, it might be some kind of service (to be used to translate any webpage - similar to babelfish only using a program instead of a person) and someone at some point clicked on JU to be translated. Maybe that's why the link originally appeared in google, then as we click around on different blogs, the bot translates the new pages on request. The big problem with that is translation bots are highly innacurate. They have serious issues with slang, grammar (even basic grammar), and they can't rely on context when a word has various meanings or a homonym is present.