Recycling Ideograms in Google to find Asian Herbal Sites for Babelfish to translate

January 25, 2003

Hi All,

My comments on computer-aided learning (CAL) are those of an

amateur but the List has experts, like Bob Felt, who may want to

join in this discussion.

From a user’s viewpoint, I am blown away by the possibilities that

CAL offers; it is here to stay. In the past few years, several

conventional universities around the world have put large volumes of

course-notes on the WWW in password-protected areas. This

allows authorised users to access and download the notes. Today,

it is possible to have tutorials and exams online; the latter (exams)

are especially easy to mark if based on multiple-choice and the

student can get instant feedback on his/her marks after clicking on

the “Submit your Answers” Button.

CAL has great potential for professionals also. The advent of

professional translation software in almost every conceivable

language makes it possible to read translations from other

languages. Bob Felt is involved deeply in trying to solve the

problems of Chinese-English translation software. Major problems

remain to be solved before even the most expensive professional

packages can give accurate translations of the intended meaning in

the original language. But in the next few years, non-Chinese

speakers will be able to access digital Chinese texts, select the

desired output language, and read to their hearts’ content.

Meanwhile, Babelfish is the only FREE online package that I know

to translate Chinese, Japanese and Korean characters. At best,

the Babelfish translations are only partial and crude; it does not

recognise many characters and some of the outputs seem to be

literal and devoid of intended meaning; however, they are the only

way available to me to try to understand the meaning of Chinese,

Japanese or Korean characters.

Greg Livingston wrote:

> … If it were up to me I'd give Qi Gong the axe and mandate at

> least a bit of Chinese … [so that the students] … could look up

> character in a dictionary at least, whereas now very few can even

> do that!

I agree that, unless we students are reasonably familiar with the

ideograms, and with the structure of Chinese dictionaries, very few

of us can look up a character (or string of characters) in the

conventional way, i.e. visually. However, searching for digital

characters is fast and simple, once the user’s PC has the

necessary software to display them, and the user has access to

digital dictionaries (or Chinese textbooks or herbal databases) on

CD or on the WWW.

In my last mail, I argued that to understand the meanings of

Chinese terms, and the theory and practice of TCM AP and/or

herbalism, students/practitioners NEED NOT necessarily be fluent

in reading and writing Chinese ideograms. Also, those who wish to

deepen their knowledge of Chinese herbalism should not limit

themselves to texts or translations limited to Chinese sources. We

can get very useful insights and data from Japanese or Korean

sources also. This is because TCM principles and its main herbal

remedies form the core of Kampo and Korean herbalism also.

Therefore, although we may not be fluent in the languages, it is a

great advantage to be able to recognise at a glance whether or not

a Web Page captured in Google is written in Chinese, Japanese or

Korean. Once we know that, we know which language translator to

access in Babelfish.

In my last mail, I wrote:

> … I have been collecting ideograms and their Pinyin expression for

> a few years now, so that I can search Google using the IDEOGRAMS

> for herbal pages written in Chinese. By having Babelfish open in a

> second browser window, I can pass the Chinese URL to Babelfish [

> http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr ] and get a partial

> (imperfect but technically useful) FREE translation online. Have

> any of you used Babelfish for that purpose?

and Jim replied:

> I checked out babelfish and it is quite cool.

However, Todd continued:

> I don't quite follow what you are saying above. Could you give an

> example of what you are talking about?

OK. Suppose you want to see what is written in following Korean-

Chinese Page:

http://www.beijinglife.net/renshi/zhongyi/renshen.htm

First take a look at that page in its original script by entering THAT

URL in your browser. You will see [if your PC has the display

software] a mixture of Korean and Chinese characters. Now open a

new (second) browser window and call up Babelfish at

http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr

Then copy the Korean URL

http://www.beijinglife.net/renshi/zhongyi/renshen.htm into the

bottom panel of Babelfish and select " Korean to English " and press

Translate. You will see that most of the Korean characters are

translated into [dubious] English, but that the Chinese characters

are not translated.

Now use the back arrow to return to the Babelfish panels, and

change the language to " Chinese to English " and press translate

again. Now you will see that the Korean characters vanish or are

untranslated, but the Chinese characters are translated, or partly

so.

Another example: see the Tsumura Kampo Products page in

Japanese at http://www.tsumura.co.jp/products/index.htm

Now copy that address into the bottom panel of Babelfish and

select “Japanese to English” and press Translate.

> … does anyone know why I can't paste chinese characters into

> babelfish when I copy them from a chinese webpage. I justget a

> series of meaningless letters, numbers and symbols. Todd

As Ken said, you may need to download the software to display

Chinese (and if you want it, Japanese and Korean) characters on

your screen. Once you see them, you can copy what you want and

drop it back into Google to get other pages with the same

character strings.

For example, search for the word “maimendong” in the ADVANCED

Google Engine, selecting the language Chinese (simplified).

Then copy the three ideograms and re-enter them into Google in

quotemarks”Ideogram1Ideogram2Ideogram3” (as in the page

http://home.njenet.net.cn/njsf/17buxu/maimendong.htm ). This

returns several more Chinese pages with the maimendong

characters, You can then pass those URLs to Babelfish, as before.

Best regards,

WORK : Teagasc Staff Development Unit, Sandymount Ave., Dublin 4, Ireland

WWW :

Email: <

Tel : 353-; [in the Republic: 0]

HOME : 1 Esker Lawns, Lucan, Dublin, Ireland

WWW : http://homepage.eircom.net/~progers/searchap.htm

Email: <

Tel : 353-; [in the Republic: 0]

January 25, 2003

, " Par Scott "

<parufus@e...> wrote:

> My experiences with Babelfish have been pretty strange, and the

Chinese translations ended up sounding like psychic transmissions

from Sumerian gods being trance channeled through a Newark

beautician.

Par,

This sounds like a fantastic idea for a

movie. Forget Chinese medicine.

Write a script!

Ken

January 25, 2003

My experiences with Babelfish have been pretty strange, and the Chinese translations ended up sounding like psychic transmissions from Sumerian gods being trance channeled through a Newark beautician. NJSTAR and Wenlin are both fairly reasonable programs, with demo versions available on the web, and with them you can do a fair amount of rudimentary translation, in Wenlins case, by pointing at individual characters. It recognizes compounds and lets you add definitions to its dictionary. It even has a fair number of herb names in its dictionary, and a robust character set. It makes alot of texts easy to read.

It may represent a steep initial investment if you have to buy the program, but it's not too bad considering the amount that I've spent on reference texts and the amount of time I have to spend just thumbing through them looking for a character definition. Its real weakness (like all Chinese software) is input, but if your just cutting and pasting it's a snap.

Par

-

; lIkemlist ; mmdr-L ; vet-ie-list

Cc: vBMA ; pa-l ; pVA-L

Saturday, January 25, 2003 2:55 PM

Recycling Ideograms in Google to find Asian Herbal Sites for Babelfish to translate

I agree that, unless we students are reasonably familiar with the ideograms, and with the structure of Chinese dictionaries, very few of us can look up a character (or string of characters) in the conventional way, i.e. visually. However, searching for digital characters is fast and simple, once the user’s PC has the necessary software to display them, and the user has access to digital dictionaries (or Chinese textbooks or herbal databases) on CD or on the WWW.