Welcome to the Shadow Net
©
Past World Languages columns have mentioned the Shadow Net, that vast non-English Internet that somehow manages to escape mention in all the hoopla about the World Wide Web. Others have addressed the technical challenges of manipulating languages online. Missing so far from the series is a column about how actually to find valuable information on the Shadow Web . Since I do this for a living, this month I'll pass on some basic techniques that work for me.
Search engines
High-visibility search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, and Infoseek, do index pages in other languages; with their fast interfaces and optimised design, they are generally the best place to start a non-English search. Using their non-English services (usually accessed through links on the main page that say "Yahoo in German" and the like) helps to narrow the search to target-language pages. However, most of the non-English pages these big American engines index concern "global" (i.e., American or America-related) culture. Any advantage that they offer is therefore limited to foreign perspectives on issues better covered by the English Internet. Try a query on a Mexican telenovela star, say, and the American engines are doing well if they retrieve half of the information available, even if you search in Spanish.
For culture-specific searches, target-language search engines work best. Most of these are more country-specific than global in scope, so you generally have to run your keywords through several of them to cover the territory. They are also invariably slower and clunkier than the big guns, and are susceptible to vanish overnight. But they're still the most effective way to find information on matters that don't concern the US.
To find target-language search engines, plug the name of the language and the phrase "search engine" into your current search engine. These keywords can be either in the target language or in English, since most non-English search engines include the English words in their meta keywords. This is especially handy since the term "search engine" is rarely found in bilingual dictionaries.
Plugging those holes in your vocabulary
Come to that, the Internet is a great place to find breaking vocabulary terms that print sources miss or ignore. I don't know how translators ever survived without it. For the first time in history, we can easily locate reliable translations for those pesky terms that our clients use incessantly, but which are too new, too regional, or too colloquial to be included in print sources. Just try finding "NAFTA," "hominy," or even "Internet" in a bilingual dictionary. Even when we're successful, the translations are often suspect. For example, I found "hominy" in my French-English dictionary, but the claimed French equivalent says more about Parisian ignorance of New World cultures than it does about nixtamalised corn.
Go To Page: 1 2
