INFORMATION CENTRAL
All the News Fit to Translate
A local man puts newspapers in
other languages at your fingertips
By Siona LaFrance
Staff Writer
Rick Perez said he used to daydream about being able to read all the world's newspapers, even those written in languages he didn't understand.
Now, thanks to the Internet, he can, and so can Web users around the world who visit his new
web site (www.newstran.com), which lets users read translated online versions of hundreds of newspapers and magazines, from the Moscow Pravda to the Beijing Daily.
The translations are done by Altavista's Babel Fish, one of a handful of free translation services on the Web that can translate Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish to and from English. Babel Fish, named for the universal translator in Douglas Adams' "Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy," lets people translate text passages or entire Web pages. Users go to the site and enter the text or address for the Web page they want translated.
"What we've done is turn this into a one-click operation from our Web site using a copyrighted string of code that links the Babel Fish free translation service to a series of newsdesk interfaces on our Web site," Perez said.
Virtual translations are just that: virtually good translations. They stumble on idioms and other nuances of language, but can get across the gist of something.
Perez, who owns an advertising and public relations firm, said such a service has been one of his life-long passions.
"I first remember daydreaming about being able to read all the foreign newspapers back in 1961 during the Cuban Missile Crisis. I remember it distinctly, because at the time I was a 'serious' young reporter on my high school newspaper in Baton Rouge. Later, in journalism school at LSU, I continued to dream and read the International Journalism Review and World Press Review."
His interest in international news and affairs intensified when he served as an honorary vice consul in New Orleans for the Republic of Liberia during the early 1980's. In 1986, he co-founded and was manging editor of the short-lived World Magazine, an international review of activist journalism.
Perez currently operates Humanitas-International (www.humanitas-international.org), a nonprofit organization, which he describes as "dedicated to providing a wide range of hard-to-find historical data and miscellaneous information from both the left and right."
