I was a bit surprised to see a Dutch title above one of Peter’s blog posts. It referred to the blog of Marco Derksen, that I follow. I think Peter may have found it in the list of blogs I follow (in OPML) that I publish.
Peter read it through machine translation. Reading the posting made me realise I only follow blogs in the languages I can read, but that that is limiting my awareness of what others across Europe and beyond blog about.
So I think I need to extend my existing list of demands for an RSS reader with built-in machine translation. As both Tiny Tiny RSS which I self host and Google translate have API’s that should be possible to turn into a script.
English
I did indeed find that blog, and several other keepers, in your OPML. Thank you. Not only have they provided me with helpful insights, but I feel like I’m gaining small insights into how Dutch works.
Thinking about this more, I wonder if it’s not something better handled by a web service to which you’d pass an RSS feed and it would return a translated version of same.
Yes, that might be a good way to go about it. Especially where I want to always translate an entire feed (say, a Japanese feed where I don’t know the script). In other cases I likely would want to be able to switch between original and translation or just translate specific postings (e.g. feeds in Italian, Spanish , where I either want to check a weird translation against the original, once I know the context enough to better read the original. Or in Cyrillic or Greek, where I can slowly read the script and may want to compare the actual text to the translation to get a basic knowledge of words). When I was tracking all European open data news for the EC for about 3 years, I noticed how my reading skills in the various EU languages improved from reading the original and translation side by side, up to the point that for half a dozen or so languages I could browse the original to determine well enough if it was of interest.
It looks like https://www.integromat.com/ could do this.