Babylon, best known for its desktop translation utility everybody used to use and almost nobody seems to have anymore, has a new online text translation tool on its website.

Babylon is not the first internet translation service. Alta Vista’s Babel Fish exists for the better part of a decade but it was bought by Yahoo and disappeared into obscurity like everything else Yahoo buys; Google has a pretty good service but nobody knows it exists. Babylon is exempt from this obscurity because its translation utility is just one arm of its sprawling translation services, spearheaded by its much more useful desktop on-click translation tool. And there’s a good reason for that: these mass-text translation services suck.

Sure, sometime you come across something someone wrote in a Russian blog about you, and you need some sense of what was written — is it a secret crush? Are you being mocked? In those cases, you don’t care how quick and dirty the translation is.

In every other case, these services suck too much to be useful. In fact, they’re the butt of jokes for years — freaky lost in translation games are a favorite pastime for geeks. And some use Babylon’s name as a derogative for bad translation.

Translation is a fine art of understanding context and bridging the sensibilities and sensitivities of two languages. It’s a work of intelligence, and artificial ones, for now, won’t do. We can teach them what hot dog means and how it differs from warm canines, but almost every word has different meanings and subtle shades of meaning and the same goes for the target language. Think about how many things “ass” means.

Okay, ready? Here it is this article translated to Hebrew with Babylon.

I hate television. There’s nothing more scary to me than the deadening of the senses television brings. Yeah, I work for a television company. No, it’s no contradiction: by doing a good job with Keshet’s new website, I seriously hope to help bring about the death of the tube. You know, my small part in it.

So I was rather surprised at myself when I sat down to watch the first episode of Big Brother Israel (called here האח הגדול). I kinda guessed it’s gonna be something I’d have to deal with at work, I wanted to know what the brouhaha was all about — but those aren’t really excuses, are they? I hate television, and more than that I hate the lowbrow, old, tired Israeli television, and even more than that I hate those sneaky and manipulative reality shows — but even more than all of that I hate Israeli reality shows. And there I was, sitting there, smiling besides myself and having too much fun to feel guilty about it. Really. Having. So much fun.

Who’s going in the house next? A short guy with a success complex and homophobia? Ooh! Give me one of these! The too gay to be actually gay guy? Yes! His straight twin? Give, give, give! The big-titied girl’s father? I sat there for an hour in my own adolescent fun juices and I couldn’t wipe that smile off my goddamn face. This show rocks. I do work for these guys, so what’s my opinion worth? Well, that’s the first show I ever said nice things about. Ever.

Rise of the Internet-TV-Show

Why was I enjoying myself? Have I grown callus and dark and indifferent to the sick manipulations played on fame-hungry idiots? Likely. But also, I guess that I felt, even through the programming, that I’m watching the first real internet-TV-show. There were a few TV-internet-shows, certainly some internet-shows, but this is something else. Allow me to explain.

Some shows put on extra filmed material on the web now. As Aaron Sorkin said, there’s only 22 minutes and 11 seconds on a TV show — and it’s so easy to fill the net with everything you had to leave out. Smart networks have fake blogs for TV characters –here’s Barny’s from How I Met Your Mother — and, of course, you can buy and watch whole episodes for free online. And then there are Internet shows like the very excellent Dr. Horrible Sing-Along Blog, created specifically for the more limited, but savvier internet viewers.

This something else. This is the next wave for television. It’s a TV show, which means it brings in TV crowds — in terms of volume, in terms of sophistication — but the main medium the TV people are gonna watch it is on our 24/7 4-camera live feed from the house. The show is still at the boring first stage, but they’re already doing it; there’s a forum on Big Brother, and they sit there, devouring the feed, talk about what they see: the fridge door won’t close. Someone explains on the forum how they can fix that. They’re baking Challah for Shabbath. Someone remarks on their technique. Their lingo is undecipherable, unless you’re also watching the feeds 24/7. Someone says “I can’t believe it just happened!” Someone else agrees. Someone blinked for a second. He asks “what happened?” Nobody answers. If you don’t keep watching, all the time, you’re out of the game.

Stephen Hawking gave a less-than brilliant talk for the very brilliant TED. Hawking being hawking, he didn’t come over to do his talk, but telecast it from a borrowed classroom in Cambridge. As usual, he talked about, you know, life, the universe, everything. The talk was broadcast and everything was okay before someone noticed that while he was talking, the answer was there all along, on the board: on the upper right hand corner you can see it plainly: A=43-1. (Go to TED’s site for a close-up).

We are back from a forced hiatus; do expect non-daily, but still kinda-frequent updates from this moment on.

Well. It seems I am not just incerdibly pretty, but also a renowned net prophet. Story goes like this: it was February of 2007 and love was still fresh as I waded into the world of online journalism. My first piece for the Israeli nrg suggested fresh start-up ideas nobody thought of (caution: Hebrew): the News Yeller for the elderly, who also got the Electronic Grandson — a live-translation elderly to tech support guy service — and also the Porn Out Loud, which I said would bring the blind population closer to the warm embrace of the net:

Online, the blind are a severely disenfranchised minority. Not only you can’t send funny pics to your vision-impaired friends, not only they have nothing to do in YouTube, but just think of a porn-free internet! Brrrr.

So a year goes by and one day you wake up to find your weird dreams have taken shape. Here it is: Porn For the Blind. It’s a non-profit org dedicated to make life just a little bit filthier for those less fortunate. I tried to listen to the MP3 version of Eight Street Latinas, but succumbed to an uncontrollable fit of giggles. That’s the way it is: your dreams are meant for others.

Google has increasingly unfunny April Fools’ pranks. In one of them, you can now send emails into the past. They have a flux capacitor for that. The other implements cell phones, buckets and net-controlled devices to get you to wake up. But funny or not, lemme tell you, I wouldn’t mind. When Google does things, it does them well. And since no other tech company gets me to wake up… You know. And knowing Google, they won’t only wake you up; they’ll show up at your place with coffee and croissants.

Which is to say, the future definitely lies in a very actual Google presence in the real world. They will manage our lives much better than we ever did. And that’s okay with me.

As some of you know, I recently joined Israeli television company Keshet (channel 2) as the digital editor at their upcoming new website, called mako. Site’s not up yet (we launch in April), but we’re feeding some news items to the old Keshet website. Here’s the first news item, about Google’s Hebrew website’s going black in honor of Earth Hour (which is two days early in Israel, Sabbath and all).

I gave a once-over to my mangy number two on Calcalist in the Google. Jesus was that thing written like — well, I don’t want to say like what. I hope it wasn’t them that wrote that thing. I kept the basic gist, added a little bit of clarification and some extra info, corrected not a few misspells, and, oh yeah, ended that stupid line about Calcalist being an “affectionado of economics”. Sounds like a damn cigar magazine.

Meanwhile, Calcalist’s website rose from fifth to fourth place in Google (it’s first on Live.com, but nowhere on the first page in Yahoo), while my dingy, two-days old, no-design-yet blog that’s not about them rose from second to first. That’s strange, and also a shame, because Calcalist has a bitchin’ Internet team, and once they unleash them they might have a very powerful presence. I sound bitching but I’m not. I do hope Calcalist will do well. There’s good people there, and while I’m not a fan of this business news rush Israel’s having, but there’s no denying that given stiff competition, these journals can turn out some really good material that mainstream media just ignores.

 (16.3: Fixed!)

I guess most of you know by now I left Calcalist, an ambitious new business journal backed by Israel’s largest newspaper, Yediot Ahronot. I thought about sharing the reasons with you — using a point-by-point illustration with before-and-after versions of an article, but I’m too polite for that.

But I will say that a last week this aspiring new publication printed an interview I made with Mark Frauenfelder. Mark is not only the founder of Boing Boing; he’s also the executive editor for the very cool MAKE Magazine, the epicenter of a subculture bent on making their own imprint on technology.

But alas: the printed version of the article was so severely mauled by its editors, so effectively watered down and cheapened as to appeal to none but the least interested – that it led me to a couple of conclusions. The first is that I’m ever more glad to have left. The second is that I do need a journalism blog, if only to post the original, the tame and untouched versions of those mutilated babies of mine, which they’ll continue to run in Calcalist in months to come. So (trumpets!) here it is, after the cut.

We’ll start with the original version of the Frauenfelder interview. I’ll have it – and all future articles, for copyright’s sake – translated soon, but I’m so offended by what’s published, and it bears so little relation to the original, that I’m taking this liberty once.

Among the many mistakes the editors made with this article, they forget to mention Eviatar Tron, who helped prepare this article. Thanks, Eviatar.

(If you want to be as offended like I am, drop a note and I’ll show the molested version).

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