As you note, translating a whole article is likely to give at least some idea of what the article is about. Formal articles will also tend to follow various rules more strictly, which probably also helps.

I suspect my task–taking the tagline for a blog and one or two post titles–is particularly difficult. Fortunately, I won\’t actually be using any machine translations at all. I\’ll either have human translations or I\’ll leave the text untranslated.

The Dutch Translation of Ronald is correct.
I agree with Fiona. I use the translation tools often though, for reference work. Complete sentences are very poor, but when u translate a whole text u can often understand what it tries to tell you.

A few weeks ago I received a reference question about a very rare italian cheese. The patrons had been searching for months. I started googling, but not in dutch or english, but in French (google.fr) and italian (it). My French is good but I don’t speak italian. After a while i stumbled upon an Italian restaurant-site (small place in mountains) which had much info on food in italian. With babelfish I found some new keywords which led me to the answer. What a joy that was: for me and the patron.

Human language has many twists. I always wonder how good the tools will get eventually.

Greetings

Edwin
http://zbdigitaal.blogspot.com , Zeeuwse Bibliotheek

In general, software does a pretty poor job of translating even well-written works like parts of a book or newspaper articles. Language is too nuanced for a machine to interpret correctly. It’s ok for short phrases or where you need to get the idea of what an article is about. Then again, that’s just as well, when I was studying Italian at university, it would have been tempting to use Babelfish now and then

Bibliotekarens bibliotek – The librarians library – Real tagline – Tanker og funderinger rundt det meste, men kanskje spesielt om Bibliotek 2.0 — Thoughts and musings about most things, but especially about Library 2.0.
Correct URL: http://www.miromurr.no
Old URL http://www.miromurr.no/bibliotek is no longer correct.

Helenes hengekøye – Helen´s hammock –
Spredte tanker om bibliotek, litteratur, teknologi og annet som opptar meg. – Thoughts about libraries, literature, technology and other things that engages me.

The way librarians and libraries sees themselves (It’s a fairly minor aspect of what I’m blogging)

Libraries, Publishing

Infogestores
Info-managers

Bibliotecología y gestión de información.
Library science and information management.

phpCollab: gestión de proyectos online.
phpCollab: online project management.

Ce weblog traite de sujets ayant trait aux sciences de l’information.
This weblog deals with subjects relating to information sciences.

GoogleZon : scénario du possible.
GoogleZon: possible scenarios

La guerre du stockage en ligne
The war of online storage

Carnet à propos du droit d’auteur, d’Internet etdes bibliothèques par Olivier Charbonneau.
Notebook about authors’ rights, the Internet, and libraries; by Olivier Charbonneau.

Droit d’auteur et déficiences visuelles.
Authors’ rights and sight disabilities.

Bandes dessinées à propos du droit d’auteur.
Comic strips (?) about authors’ rights.

Errances et flâneries au fil de mes représentations : un blog sur le monde de l’information et des bibliothèques.
Walks and wanderings for my own personal entertainment (?): a blog on the world of information and libraries.

Une autre histoire de bibliothèques.
Another history of libraries.

Le jargon bibliothéconomique.
Library jargon.

Blog sur les systèmes d’information documentaires, les nouveautés informatiques et d’autres curiosités.
Blog on document information systems, novelties in informatics, and other curiosities.

Repositories.
Repositories.

Pause forcée!
Forced break!