[ANN] Spy on the Japanese Rubists

Posted by Dr Nic on August 29, 2006 and blessed with 12 comments

Their Ruby code is surrounded by a shrouded of Japanese symbols. You know there is gold in there, but its left to the reader to interpret the purpose of the article. Happy Japanese man? Cranky Japanese man?

The creator of Ruby is Japanese, the Rubist magazine is in Japanese, and a great many users of Ruby are Japanese, yet I can’t understand a word they are saying. That’s not their fault. It’s my French teacher’s fault.

Wonder no longer. Thanks to Google Translate’s Japanese to English translation and the Bookmarklet feature of Firefox (and other browsers?)

Drag this Bookmarklet into your links toolbar, and start spying on the Japanese.

Bookmarklet: Spy on Japanese

Want to spy on the Germans? Drag it again, and change the embedded url. Look for the langpair=ja&en and change ja to de. (Cheat: Spy on Germans)

Want to encourage our Japanese friends to spy on you? Perhaps add links on your pages for instant translations from English to Japanese (change ja -> en, and en -> ja), and change the hl=en to hl=ja.

<a href="#" onclick="location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?langpair=en&ja&hl=ja&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&u=' + encodeURIComponent(location.href)">Translate into Japanese</a>

Test this here:

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  1. Beate Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:12:03 UTC

    The German translation via google of your site is very bad. I nearly don’t unterstand a single sentence :(

  2. Dr Nic Tue, 29 Aug 2006 16:13:54 UTC

    I don’t make any sense in English either, before the translation.

  3. shev Tue, 29 Aug 2006 17:15:17 UTC

    haha!
    well german is fine, english is fine
    but i dont understand a single japanese WRITTEN word (kanji?)

    and anyone ever tried to translate via babelfish will quickly
    find out that it seems like a very secret language even much after
    “translating” …

  4. choonkeat Tue, 29 Aug 2006 19:02:00 UTC

    If you don’t know who (what language) you’re spying on, this will help http://labs.rssfwd.com/translator/

  5. riffraff Tue, 29 Aug 2006 21:19:44 UTC

    you can even use firefox/m,ozilla keywords instead of a bookmarklet, see for example here:
    Btw, excite.co.jp used to have a much better translator from japanese than google, and it seem it still does.

  6. Dr Nic Wed, 30 Aug 2006 06:15:42 UTC

    @riffraff – I found a textarea translator on excite.co.jp; Does it have a translator where you pass a URL?

  7. Dr Nic Wed, 30 Aug 2006 06:16:39 UTC

    @choonkeat – can support whole page translation via URL?

  8. Dr Nic on Ruby on Rails » Foreign tourists to your websites (part 2) Wed, 30 Aug 2006 10:21:56 UTC

    [...] As a follow-up to the recent “Spy on the Japanese” post, you might want a nice set of links for your visitors to translate your page sinto their language. [...]

  9. choonkeat Wed, 30 Aug 2006 15:59:42 UTC

    Not yet. What I do is to select a piece of text on a page, and click the tryanslater bookmarklet to translate it.

  10. leo Sun, 03 Sep 2006 07:16:39 UTC

    Is this what you were looking for?

    “Translate into Japanese” -> 日本語に翻訳
    “Read in Japanese” -> 日本語で読む

  11. How to follow the Ruby revolution « HoloFlux Mon, 04 Sep 2006 17:27:50 UTC

    [...] Spy on Japanese http://drnicwilliams.com/2006/08/29/ann-spy-on-the-japanese-rubists Explore posts in the same categories: Articles [...]

  12. ariekeren Wed, 17 Jan 2007 07:41:26 UTC

    I’d rather learn Japanese to be satisfied in Japanese atmosphere, besides, it’s fun :)

Comments