ChristianFutures.com now enables machine translation in eight languages, using machine translation from AltaVista Babel Fish. Readers can translate any third level article page into their preferred language, by just clicking on a language flag in the far right column.

Disclaimer: Babel Fish, as a machine translation, at times, can miss nuances, and communicate just the opposite to what the writer intended.

Translating languages is a very complex task. Machine translation service is intended to help you get the general meaning of our original text, but is not intended to produce a polished translation. For important materials, you should consult a human translator. Also, because Babel Fish is an automated translator, it works best when the text has perfect grammar. Expect Babel Fish to allow you to grasp the general intent of the original, not to produce a polished translation. Text that contains slang, misspelled words, poorly placed punctuation, or complicated sentence structure, may not yield the most accurate results.

Machine translation produces reasonable results in many cases. But you should not rely on it. If you want to send a translated text to another person or use it in correspondence, always explain that you are using an automatic translator named Babel Fish and append or reference the original text. This acknowledgement will put the translation into the right context and will help you avoid embarrassing misunderstandings. When it's important to have an accurate translation, ask a human translator to polish the Babel Fish translation.

Another important point to keep in mind is that Babel Fish translation produces familiar, instead of honorific, translations. Familiar language is what you would use when you’re speaking to close friends or family. However, most business communications should be in honorific language, which uses a more formal form of address and diction to show respect.

Most claim Babel Fish translations are most accurate with languages that use the Roman alphabet. Even when you’re able to get a translation from English to an Asian alphabet, we found that you can’t copy the translation into another platform unless you have software that recognizes the non-Roman characters.

This article was adapted from Christopher Leporini's web review.