Foreign Gluten-Free and Celiac Blogs

I was reading the various blog postings today, and saw how Ellen posted a blog entry that talked about some of the foreign Gluten-Free and Celiac blogs that were out there. I followed one of her links, and found Ana Montero's SOLOCELIACOS celiac blog, which is in Spanish (she is located in Madrid, Spain).

After reading a couple of Ana's articles (thankfully I took a couple semesters of Spanish in College), I thought it would be nice to include her blogs in the gluten-free blog and news aggregator. So, I contacted Ana and asked if she could setup an RSS feed. After getting past some initial language barriers, she quickly succeeded, and her blog entries are now showing up in the aggregator as from any other "trusted source".

Now, I want to help anyone that just speaks English to be able to read some of the foreign blog postings and understand the basics of what is being communicated. There is this wonderful tool called Altavista Babel Fish Translator that we are going to use. I use this all the time when I need a few "hints" to work through the meaning of certain Spanish, German, French, or Russian web sites. I can usually get the gist of a discussion without it, but I often have trouble deciphering some of the more complex conjugations.

So, if you want to translate a blog posting, here is what to do:

1. On the news item headline in the gluten-free blog aggregator, right-click (your mouse) and choose either "Copy Link Location" (Firefox) or "Copy Shortcut" (IE).
2. Go to Altavista Babel Fish Translator
3. There will be an edit-box that has a heading of "Translate a Web page". Place your cursor in that box, empty the contents out, then right-click (mouse) and choose "Paste" - this should have pasted the URL of the news-item into the edit box (e.g., http://soloceliacos.blogspot.com/2007/03/campaa-de-los-celiacos-en-los.html ).
4. Now, directly under the box where you put the address, there is a drop-down that says "Select from and to languages". Choose the appropriate combination - in this example case, we want "Spanish to English"
5. Press the "Translate" Button to the right, and, Voilà, you should (after a few seconds) be presented with a translation of the gluten-free blog posting - at least a pseudo-translation that is close enough to garner the general meaning from.

Now you can join in on the global, multi-cultural, and multi-lingual gluten-free and celiac news and blog postings when you encounter them. Babel Fish also offers the ability to translate a block of English to another language in case you feel compelled to post responses to any blogs, but, I warn you ahead of time: do not expect the reader in the other language to always understand exactly what you post.

Babel Fish isn't quite able to accurately convert between languages and preserve the exact meaning you had in mind. But, it is able to at least get you "in the ball park". Also, from experience, Babel Fish does better at converting simple phrasings - so, don't get too fancy with any replies unless you know the target language well enough to know if what the tool produces is somewhat accurate :)