Sunday, February 12, 2006

Google's decision to index China's network (and allow the government to control it) is rightly controversial. The most telling comparison is to do an image search for the two terms "Tienanmen Square" and "protest": the Chinese version has a single image, whereas the non-censored version has the expected pictures of bodies, tanks, etc.

Despite obvious censorship, however, Jim at Think Christian notes that many Christian sites are included in their index. Curious, i googled for SemanticBible, which is also included. Even more interestingly, they have a machine translation into Chinese (beta of course, Google's standard approach): here's the translated version, and a screenshot (click on the image for the full size view, if that helps!).

A picture named SB_Chinese (Small).jpg

Note they weren't able to get a few words like "Composite Gospel" or "NT Names" fully translated (not surprisingly). I'm more surprised about the omission of specific terms like "Scripture" and "weblog" (but not technical terms like XML, RDF, and meta-data). Also amusing is that it takes 6 characters to represent "PDF" (the icon on the right under the Search button).

I'd be really curious to know how well this reads in Chinese.


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