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.

Well, that’s it.

We put an incredible amount of wait into it. And finally, mako is online. Was it worth the whole wait? I think so. (I’ve been hanging around Keshet only for seven months, but some people have been working on this thing for two years). It’s a well made site — bugs and stability issues aside — and while leaning heavily towards television related content and celebrity festivities, I think some of its content is the best the Hebrew web has to offer.

(Will this mean I’m back to writing here and in Quotendquote? I certainly hope so).

What have I been up to these past seven months? I’ve been hired to found and edit the Digital section in mako. Digital was to deal with personal electronics and the internet in a broad-audience way; I pulled it a little to the geek side, while still keeping some of it 12-o’clock-flash-y.  Somewhere in the middle of work the Men’s section needed a new editor, so I took that too. I don’t know which section I’m proud of more, but I am very proud of both, and of the wonderful people who worked with me, day and night and weekend, to make them look like they do now.

I’ll write about those sections, mainly Digital, a lot more in the coming months. I also want to share with you a few of the insights I gained while working with the technologists in Keshet — mainly, about how not to produce a site like this. But right now I’m tired, tired, tired. In the meanwhile, if you can read Hebrew, browse mako for a while. Have fun.

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.

Soon we shall resume updating.

For now, the Gadgets section in Keshet’s old website resumes its operation, which means my tech news column (Hebrew) is back after a six-month hiatus and two job changes. Also in Gadgets: Gal Nedivi (Israel’s Zombit) with some cool gadgets (and GTA IV on a big-ass screen).

The forces that rule over man’s deadlines have decided Keshet Mako (that’s where I work!) won’t be up during April, but we grit our teeth and we make sure we’re the best we can be in the time we’re given and we hope for an early launching. As for me, I’m still thirsty for more writers. So if you’re passionate about technology, if what happens online matters to you, and if you can write a damn sentence, drop us a note.

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.

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).