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 Previous: How to Keep Having Fun During the Declining Solar Cycle |  Next: Get Your Radio Merit Badge Day |
By Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU
Contributing Editor
February 4, 2005
This week, we show how you can sprinkle a foreign phrase into your next DX contact.
Say "DX," and most hams think, "communicating with someone in a foreign country."
Amateur Radio is international. Most countries permit Amateur Radio to one degree or another. So, if you get on the right band at the right time, there is a good chance that you can communicate with someone beyond the borders of your homeland.
If they speak in a foreign tongue and you do not understand it, your communication is limited. Perhaps, you can exchange signal reports, maybe your names, and perhaps your locations, but not much else.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to exchange a few words in a foreign language? Or how would you like to translate the blurb about that new radio that you saw featured in a Japanese magazine?
Believe it or not, you can do it. There are various online language translators on the Internet where you type in a word or phrase, click on a button, and the translator returns the word or phrase translated into the language of your choice. Some translators handle a limited selection of languages; while others are language specific, for example, a Polish language specific translator would only translate words between the Polish language and other languages (Polish-to/from-English, Polish-to/from-French, Polish-to/from-Russian, etc.)
 Wikipedia and Babel Fish are online references that come in handy on the air (and when I write this column). |
Babel Fish, on the other hand, is an online text translation service provided by the Web portal AltaVista that handles a wide selection of languages: English, Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish.
I type "My name is Stan," select English-to-Dutch, click the Translate button, and "Mijn naam is Stan" comes out at the other end. Try it again choosing English-to-Russian and "Моим именем будет Stan" is the result. Sure I can take a stab at pronouncing the Dutch translation, but I think I will skip the Russian. The system is not perfect, but it is still a powerful tool provided to you gratis by way of the Internet.
By the way, Babel Fish is named after "a fictional species of fish in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams. A Babel fish is a highly improbable biological universal translator. It appears as a 'small, yellow and leechlike' fish. When a Babel fish is inserted into the ear canal it allows the 'wearer' to 'instantly understand anything said... in any form of language.'"
The Babel Fish was named after the Tower of Babel. "According to the narrative in Genesis Chapter 11 of the Bible, the Tower of Babel was a tower built by a united humanity in order to reach the heavens. To prevent the project from succeeding, God confused their languages so that each spoke a different language and the work could not proceed. After that time, people moved away to different parts of Earth. The story is used to explain the existence of many different languages and races."
The Babel Fish and Tower of Babel descriptions come from Wikipedia, an online "free-content encyclopedia that anyone can edit." I refer to Wikipedia often and it deserves a plug in the same breath as Babel Fish.
Until next week, keep on surfin'.
Editor's note: Polish was
the first language of Stan Horzepa, WA1LOU, until his parents brought a radio
into their home that displayed moving pictures. To discuss Howdy Doody, foreign
languages, radio and other neat stuff, e-mail
Stan.
| Previous: How to Keep Having Fun During the Declining Solar Cycle | Next: Get Your Radio Merit Badge Day |
