In the category of being so obvious it’s a wonder it took this long for someone to do it (with a subcategory of “D’oh! I wish I’d done it first”) is Mloovi. Mloovi takes a web page or an RSS feed, runs it through Google’s translation tool, and gives you a permalink for the translated output. Mloovi also gets my vote for best Web 2.0 site subtitle: “beta (if it ain’t beta it ain’t web 2.0)”. I think I’ll adopt that as my personal motto.
So, if you’ve been dying to read RSS4Lib in French, Russian, Arabic, or Hindi, here’s your opportunity. (Mloovi offers translations between any pair of these languages: Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese (both Simplified and Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, and Swedish.
This tool will be very handy for me to keep up with the biblioblogging world that doesn’t happen to write in a language that I can read. I can also see it useful as a way to get publishers’ notifications, etc., where they are offered via RSS but inconveniently not in the language that the bibliographer speaks. Having permanent URLs for the translation, whether for a web page or a feed, is exceptionally handy. The feeds, I should note, have advertisements added as new items, noted with “ADVERT” as a prefix.
Mloovi also offers an iframe widget code; however, it only allows a single translation, not a choice for your users — unless you want to clutter up your interface with lots of buttons. Here, as an example, is the English-to-German translation of RSS4Lib’s feed:
Oh, and a note about the name: “mloovi” (actually, “mlooví,” with a long “í” — something impossible to render in a domain name) is the Czech 3rd person singular — he, she, or it speaks.
Addendum (12 August 08): Mike from mloovi.com pointed out in the comments that multiple languages can be selected in the widget — for example:
2 thoughts on “Read RSS in Your Language”
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Hi Ken,
Thanks for your article, glad you like the concept (and the subtitle ;))
Just thought I would let you know, the widget generator does actually let you generate feeds for all languages in one go. You just need to select all the languages while holding down Ctrl. I clearly need to make this easier, but we are only 6 days old so hopefully you will let us off with this one.
Anyway thanks again for your great write up and I hope you enjoy Mloovi. We will be releasing some exciting new features very soon so stay posted.
Cheers
Mike
http://mloovi.com
MIke,
Thanks for the note and the gentle correction — I hadn’t tried to control-click, but should have realized it was possible. I added a multi-lingual version of the widget as an addendum to my original post.
Ken