Have you heard of 'Babel Fish'?

It's a service provided by Alta Vista search engine people to translate every page you put 'Babel Fish' code, and up comes a a new language.

Your page may be written in English, but people across Spain and Latin America can translate your web page into Spanish. Likewise if your web page is written in Spanish, German, French, Chinese, Japanese, or Korean, people can have an instant translation into English, or another language they are comfortable with.

I have put 'Babel Fish' code onto every page on my site at:- http://www.ebook-sales.com and I can see from the stats on the server that people are clicking on 'Babel Fish' to have a translation. This I feel, widens my audience out there in cyberspace. The 'hit counter' has substantially risen, I have people bookmarking my site, because I see they don't all come in the 'front door' to the site, they come in to certain pages that interests them.

Every new page I put on my site, and I update fairly often, I make sure the 'Babel Fish' code is at the top of the html on that page.

The technology is certainly improving, I remember science- fiction movies when I was young had computers to instantly translate into any language, but the technology has only just arrived in reality and can be used widely on the web.

In previous articles I wrote about the Chinese market about to be opened up, for there are more people in China logging on to the internet every day. There are businesspeople in the west who are eyeing this market at the moment. To those people I would ask them to seek out some of my previous articles on Ideamarketers.com and take into account what I say there.

It's also no good to the vast population of China, who do not speak any other language, to see sites always put up in English. Some attempt must be made to have parallel pages with Chinese throughout, or resort to the excellent technology that is 'Babel Fish', and as I know the corporate world moves grindingly slowly, the adept

Does your company pay a translation service to be able to send documents abroard?

Translation services are costly and slow. If you put your documents on a server in html and insert the code for 'Babel Fish' at the top of every page, you can send an email giving the address of the pages, you can also send a password to get into these pages, no one else will be able to view them, and this will avoid translation costs and slow turnaround of such a service.

Likewise technical manuals could be scanned into html pages, code for 'Babel Fish' inserted at the top of every page, upload the manual to a server, password protect, and your company, to people abroard, will look like something out of 'Startrek', and they will be confident in doing more business with you in the future.

There is only one thing that I have found personally, as I am an author and only write in English, I find if I compile an ebook to an .exe file, as most ebook-compilers do, the 'Babel Fish' code I already placed at the top of every html page before compilation, does not work. The pages are compiled into gibberish anyway, and I suppose the code for 'Babel Fish' the same.

It would be a great leap forward to me and other writers producing ebooks, to have a compiler that can have built-in translation facility into several languages.

If anyone can do this excellent programming idea, I would be the first to buy such a compiler. There lies the nub of a great business invention almost akin to the start of a great software company, like Microsoft.

Why not take this idea further, all movies could be made with built-in translation, all t.v. shows made with translation, to sell these shows abroard.

What else can you think of?

I remember an old saying:- "Whatever the mind of man can conceive, it can achieve!".

Think about it!

Tony Dean - writer and published author - runs a web site at:-

http://www.ebook-sales.com