Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org>]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> I think that the babel service will go away entirely if it's made so
> ubiquitously accessible in reading interfaces.

Well, babelfish seems to have gone away already.  :-(  The host seems
totally dead at the moment.

Anyway, the "Babelfish tool page" (if I remember correctly) detailed
how to install an automatic translator into Mozilla and MSIE based on
babelfish.  I think it added a plugin that adds a button to the
toolbar that would translate the current page.

I think the impact of Gnus users compared to that would be
negligible. 

> Once Gnus is able to do such a thing, one can only wonder how long
> before Netscrape and Internet Exploder plug-ins will become available
> to do the same thing.

:-)  

> There is after all a heavy feature-copying mentality in such stuff.
> (Recall why Gnus gained smilification.)

Er...  Remind me.  I thought it was because Wes wrote the code.  :-)

> Keeping translation as a manual request for a single article should be
> the way to go.  Auto-translating whole hierarchies will just hurt us,
> on a social level.  Those reading national hierarchies should in
> general be capable in the subject language.

They should, but...  For instance, there are quite a lot of people who
work in Norway (for shorter or longer time) who don't speak
Norwegian.  These get along well verbally if the speak English, but
they can't read the Norwegian newsgroups.  Wouldn't it be neat if they 
could?  (Babelfish doesn't do Norwegian, but, like.)  

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen