Pacific Websites


PACIFIC VOCABULARIES, DICTIONARIES ETC.

Austronesian Basic Vocabulary Database http://language.psy.auckland.ac.nz/austronesian/word.php

FREELANG ONLINE DICTIONARIES (also Downloadable for Windows) A significant list of Austronesian-family languages, including Polynesian and Micronesian. However, they are poor for material culture words. http://www.freelang.net/dictionary/index.php

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FREE ONLINE TRANSLATORS

NOTE: I have not tried all of these for every text

It is reasonable that these free translators have certain languages that they handle better than others when rendering into English or back. If it is important text, I generally run a test through a couple and then make decisions about which seems the best fit. They are pretty fast so that is not a great problem. But you won't want to try and translate whole books!

Babylon (claims to translate 75 languages to any language from any language. NOTE: the site will try to sell you a paid version. If you do not wish to buy it, you can still use the boxes on this page to do translations). http://www.translation.babylon.com/

Dictionaries.com (includes those languages listed for SDL and Wordlingo, and some European languages they don't have, PLUS: Afrikaans, Filipino, Haitian Creole, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Malay, Maltese, Swahili, Tagalog, Welsh, Yiddish, etc.)  http://translate.reference.com/ (of all those I have tried, this seemed to give the best results in German to English — really very good).

Google translate (the only one that seems to include Latin! It has all of those listed under Dictionaries.com PLUS Azerbaijani, Basque, Belarusian, Bengali, Gujarati, Kannada, Persian, Tamil and Telegu, among others.)

imTranslator (a large language list comparable with Dictionaries.com) http://www.imtranslator.net/translation/

Promt (sic) Online (translates to and from most European languages plus Arabic, Hindi) http://translation2.paralink.com/ (of all those I have tried, this seemed to give the best results in French to English translations, of all those listed).

SDL Free Translation (will detect language if you don't know what it is, also translates to and from most European languages plus Hebrew, Turkish, Arabic, Pashto, Urdu, Hindi, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and Thai)  http://www.freetranslation.com/

Worldlingo (similar range to SDL, including detection)  http://worldlingo.com/en/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html

Yahoo Babelfish (formerly Altavista Babelfish) — English to and from Chinese, Dutch, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, AND French to and from all of those except Chinese, Japanese and Russian.  http://babelfish.altavista.com/

If you have positive experience of any other free online translators, or have a comment on any of those above, PLEASE Contact me and share your information with other scholars!