Notas sobre Internet

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Automatic translation

The attached icon , provides a English translation of the actual page, that uses the Portal of Linguistic Technologies of the Cervantes Institute in Spain.   A gratuitous service of automatic translation, sponsored by the Spanish company Telefonica, whose objective is to facilitate the access in Spanish to those Internet contents which are developed in other languages, and that the speakers of other languages can accede to the contents that are only available in Spanish.

In our case, those readers who are more comfortable with an English text that with the Spanish version, must understand the translation like a complementary aid to the original text (that will remain in the initial window) and not like a substitution of the same one. The reason is that in the present state of the technique, the automatic translation still presents numerous problems. Mainly in texts like the present, that combine words of the Spanish colloquial language with very specific others of the computer science dictionary, and with paragraphs (generally quotations) and words that retain their original English.

Aside from the typical deficiencies of this type of utilities (some translations are really comic), this one in particular, presents some own characteristics. The most showy are the following ones:

• "All" the sentences are translated, including code examples. For example, the expression R = x + y in the original one, can appear like R = x + and in the English translation!!.
• The engine make a English translation of paragraphs that already are in English (the translation over-the-translation changes some words, which sometimes, make lose the sense to the phrase).
• The links to page foot-notes, lose the connection and do not work. In addition, the number usually is displaced.
• Links existing in the page lead to a translated version of the referenced page.

We hope that, in spite of its limitations, the translation represents a valuable help for those English-speaking readers who find difficulty with the language of the author.