Babel Fish Translator update?

[Brett_Tabke]

When did babel fish add Korean, Chinese, Japanese and Russian?

That is quite a leap forward.

Now I wish they would do the Nordic countries of Europe. Norway and Sweden are such net hot spots right now.

[rencke]

I am afraid that our populations are too small, even though the task would be a lot simpler than the monumental difficulties that they must have surmounted for the big Asian languages and Russian. (Swedish, Danish and Norwegian are all Germanic languages, like English.) Besides, everybody up here understands English anyway and most sites are bilingual at least. (Minimum of 6 years of English mandatory in schools, most have 9 years of it.) Plus: movies and television shows in English are shown with subtitles rather than being dubbed, so there is constant exposure.

I think Dutch will be the next European language on Babelfish and am keeping my fingers crossed for Polish. Doubt if we'll see Finnish in the next several years, although it would be much needed. It is so different from everything else, that one cannot even guess. And extremely difficult to learn, because of the complicated grammar.

Don't hold your breath about Scandinavian languages.

Added: AV has no press release about this. Checked the homepage of systransoft.com who supply the technology for Babelfish. They haven't got a press release about it either, but the additional languages are now part of their top of the line premium package (and only that one - no price on the site). So I guess this must be brand new.