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This article first appeared in the June 1997 issue of the Journal of Online Genealogy
Because not all genealogy web sites are written in your native tongue, this article reviews a web site which translates foreign language web sites. An example of a foreign language site useful for genealogy research is translated as a demonstration of the tool.
One of the problems with the global nature of the Internet is that you can't expect the genealogy Web pages which you visit to automatically be written in your native language. You may find an excellent genealogy site but be unable to understand it because it's not written in your mother tongue. A new tool is being offered on the Internet which can help translate some types of web pages from a language you don't know to a language you do know. SYSTRAN Software's WWW Translation Page (http://www.systransoft.com/) is a limited tool which can translate some Web pages. It will display the original web page's graphics and layout but with the text translated into the language of your choice. The tool is freely available online but it can only translate Web pages under 10 kilobytes in size, it can't handle Web pages which utilize frames, and its translations are not perfectly fluent.
On SYSTRAN's Web page, enter the complete URL of the target Web page you wish to have translated. Then enter the language translation pair you wish to use. This software can translate bi-directionally for English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese and one way only from Russian into English. Your e-mail address is also required.
An excellent example of a genealogy-related Web page suitable for translation is the Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchiv site in Vienna, Austria (http://www.magwien.gv.at/ma08/m08_leit.htm). This governmental archives page is written in German with no English version available. By entering its URL into the SYSTRAN's web page, selecting German to English translation, and waiting a few minutes, you soon learn that this page is roughly translated as the "Viennese city and national archives".
Let's drill down a little further on this German language site. Reading the descriptive links which lead off of the main page, you learn that the main page has a sub-page roughly translated as "The use of the Viennese of city and national archives" or Die Benützung des Wiener Stadt- und Landesarchivs in the original German. This sounds like a "how to" page for using the Archives so a translation of this sub-page may prove to be helpful. Copying and pasting this sub-page's URL into the SYSTRAN web page produces the fractured English sentence:
"Emphasis of the interest in the archives existence lies in the range of scientific research and sciencenear questions, like heimatkundlichen or genealogischen searches, in the pursuit of personal legal matters, like boarding house, property, inheritance things, as well as in the office-internal use by local government policy and city administration."
The word "genealogischen" didn't translated but you get the idea. "Genealogischen" is a link to a "Biographic and genealogy research" page or Biografische und genealogische Forschung. Clearly this page would be of interest to the genealogical researcher. Translating this page using our copy and paste method into SYSTRAN's web page produces some useful results if you're interested in Austrian genealogy.
At the bottom of the "Biographic and genealogy research" page are suggested sources for genealogical research in Vienna. These resources include including using city directories after 1859, death registrations, wills, and cemetery books. These translated Web pages, while far from perfect, certainly give us more information than if you only viewed the pages in their original German. This type of information could be extremely useful if you are hunting Austrian ancestors.
SYSTRAN's tool is limited in its translation capabilities. We can hope that more such translation tools with fewer limitations will be available on the Web soon. In the meantime, SYSTRAN's tool is certainly a helpful starting place for untangling the multilingual World Wide Web.
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