Sunday, January 11, 2009

Reading netbook news - translated from German

I'm interested in ultra-cheap no-name netbooks (just wait 'till Linux/Chromestellation comes out!). So when Scoble mentioned the German Netbook news blog, I decided to try Google Reader's machine translation.

The Feed wasn't hard to find, in part because German is relatively close to English. I added it to Google Reader, then chose the Feed Setting option to "translate into my own language".

Here's an example of the result:
Netbooks with VIA Nano CPU finally come and not too tight! Tim Brown explains you in this short video, what we should see how the strategy of VIA looks and there ever been a rudimentary preview on ARM / VIA systems, and easily so sauklein ne animal and battery life are:
It's not exactly lyrical, but it's not bad either.

Ahh, but but most of the posts don't include the full content.

Here's where Google struts its stuff.

When I click on the link from Google Reader, Google sends me to a feedburner hosted translated page version!
Translated version of http://feeds.feedburner.com/~r/AsusEeePcNews/~3/509222929/
Reason*, but we live in interesting times.

So now I'm following my first foreign language blog.

Now I'm looking for a Korean blog on netbooks ...

*God just doesn't work for me.

Update 1/14/09: There are a few rough edges ...
  1. Because the link out from the foreign language post goes to a proxy translator corporate webwasher blocks access.
  2. The auto-translation feature only works when you view the blog in isolation, if you click on Google Groups folder and view it in the company of other posts you get the original language.
  3. A link from a translated post always uses the proxy translator -- even when it's a link to an English source.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Thanks a lot for your feedback regarding the translation issue. I am working on netbooknews.com at the moment and i hope to get it online until april.

Welcome to the world of netbooks and welcome to my little blog.

Cheers

Sascha

JGF said...

Hi Sascha, thanks for writing your blog, I'll look for the new version in the spring.