ABOUT TRANSLATOR MACHINE

The information presented on CAIS in English can be automatically translated into French, German, Italian, Portuguese and Spanish by AltaVista's Babelfish machine translator. 

From the page that you are reading click on the desired language, and Babelfish will present a translation of the page. Each successive link from a translated page will also prompt you for translation.  If you wish to translate to another language click on the desired language and you will receive a dialog with the URL address of the Babelfish page to be translated.  Click on the Translate button, and Babelfish will present a translation of the page for you again.  

are on a page in English you would like to translate, go to the home page, click on the desired language and navigate to the desired page.

While machine translation produces reasonable results in many cases, you should not rely on it.  The translations are far from perfect and you will see some serious -- and often very humorous -- errors.  Read the article on Babelfish.

To escape from the translator and return to the home page, enter www.cais-soas.com in the URL Address window of your browser and press the enter key or use your "Back Button".

Babelfish has several problems that you can work around:
 • If a word has two or more meanings, the machine will take the most used.
 • If the machine doesn't know the word, it will not be translated.
 • If the URL address is to a JPEG, GIF or other non-text object, you'll get a Fetch Error. Use your browser's Back button to see the Babelfish dialog window, copy the entire URL address to your clipboard and then paste it into the browser's URL Address window and press the enter key. This will take you directly to the destination, bypassing the translator.

Unfortunately, Babelfish will only translate the first five thousand characters (about 2½ pages) of text. You'll see ***TRANSLATION ENDS HERE*** in the translated document to note that fact. Also, you will occasionally see **time-out** which means that, due to slow server response time, some information was lost; you should check the original text or repeat the translation.

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