June 20, 2003 -- I'm lousy with languages. Heck, sometimes I'm lousy with my native language. On good days, my English is passable, but I've been reduced from time to time to gesturing wildly, hoping someone will understand whatever I'm trying to get across.
The translation keys at the back of guidebooks aren't much help. I'm going to Japan later this month, and I know what I'll need to say while I'm there. Looking for "Where is the toilet?" in the back of my trusty Frommer's Tokyo, I find "Toire wa, doko desu ka?" - but how do you pronounce that? Especially with more exotic languages, it's hard to tell.
Enter travlang.com, a hidden gem of a Web site sponsored by a company that sells electronic dictionaries. Travlang offers common phrases in dozens of well-known and obscure languages. The greatest hits are there: French, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese. But you can also wow locals on your next trip with phrases in smaller languages like Frisian (spoken in the northern Netherlands) and Quechua (spoken in Peru.)
There are even a few bizarre, utterly made-up languages. What is "Eurish?" Apparently, it's a tongue created in 1999 from elements of several European languages and Chinese by a fellow with too much time on his hands.
The feature that sets Travlang apart, though, is the audio. For the more prominent languages (including tongue-twisters like Hungarian), clicking on a phrase pops up a window where a native speaker reads the phrase to you. You can then jot down the phrase in your own phonetics and maybe have more of a chance on the street than you would trying to read it out of the back of a book.
For instance, "Cheers!" in Hungarian may look unfathomable to some English speakers - it's "Eg?s?dre!" But once you've heard Travlang's confident voice say "egg-eh-shay-ged-reh" five or six times, you're ready to order a round for everybody.
A warning: this is one of the most hideously-designed Web sites I've seen in ages, with ugly backgrounds, perpetual pop-up ads and clumsy coding that crashed one of my browsers repeatedly. The site is worth the hassle for the great linguistic info.
In the case of the Japanese toilet, I clicked on the entry at Travlang and found that the phrase sounds a bit more like "toh-ee-day wa, doko des'ka?" Hopefully, later this month my practice will pay off. If you'd like to learn a language or 60, head to www.travlang.com.
I Am Moche with the Strange Languages
You probably know about Babelfish (https://babelfish.altavista.com), the popular online translation site. For years, Babelfish has patiently converted Chinese, French, German, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Portuguese, Russian and Spanish into hilarious broken English, educating and entertaining travelers who are trying to read pages from distant travel providers.
Pump up your translation abilities with WorldLingo, which adds Dutch and Greek to the mix. We told WorldLingo to translate the home page of travel agency Ionian Travel in Athens (it was Greek to us), and it did admirably, revealing to us the details of an excursion Ionian was planning to the Red Sea. Get translated at www.worldlingo.com/products_services/worldlingo_translator.html.
The results we got with tranexp.com on our Greek page weren't as good as WorldLingo's, butTranexp hits several more languages: Croatian, Czech, Danish, Finnish, Icelandic, Norwegian, Tagalog, Polish, Romanian, Serbian, Slovenian, Welsh, Swedish and Turkish. If the Web page you're scratching your head over is in one of these idioms, head to https://tranexp.com for some help. (Scroll to the bottom of the page for the translator.)
By the way, the subhead is the result of converting "I am lousy with foreign tongues" first into French, then into Dutch, then back into English using Babelfish's engine. Not bad.
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