Recently, I mentioned that one of the nifty things you can do with Yahoo! Pipes is auto-translate blogs and I’ve talked a bit before about finding Japanese blogs. This is really handy if you want to subscribe to non-English blogs.

Not only will this give you a different perspective on the news we are all reading and commenting on, but it may also help you to stay in touch with developments that may not be covered in the English-language library world. It can work in reverse too, helping those in countries where English is not their first language and there are fewer local blogs to subscribe to the major English-language blogs.

Find new blogs

The first step is to find them. I discovered the following translations for our blog genre -

English – biblioblogger
French – biblioblogueur
German – biblioblogosphäre
Japanese – ﾌﾞﾛｸﾞ(図書館) blog library (library blogger)

Search for the translated word and you’ll find many blogs in each of these languages.

Yahoo! Pipes

Note: The next step is to either create or clone a pipe in Yahoo! Pipes. Working with Yahoo! Pipes can be a little bit technical, so you might feel more comfortable just subscribing to a translated feed that has already been created.

So, what exactly is Yahoo! Pipes? It’s basically a visual mashup generator, you put in RSS or other feeds, add images, translate, or other transformations, and it gives you a new feed at the end. It is extremely versatile and because it has a visual interface, and you can copy feeds (or Pipes) made by others, this makes it easy to start to use.

First steps

Take a look at a Pipe that I created to translate the Bibliobsession 2.0 blog from French to English. You’ll probably notice one thing right away, that the translation is not very good, but machine translation is generally problemmatic, especially when dealing with technical or specialised topics. However, if you click on each article, the translations are generally better.

You can either subscribe to the translated blog as is, or you can clone the Pipe to add subscriptions to other blogs, or choose other languages.

Modifying the Pipe

If you want to have a go at modifying the Pipe, choose clone. You can then edit the source to look at the parts that make up the translation. As you can see below, there’s not a lot to it. Feed goes in, gets mashed up a bit, translated, and comes out -

To make your own, either change the feed address to another blog, or try changing the selected languages.

And voilà, you have a translated feed. Have you used Yahoo! Pipes for an interesting project? Are there blogs you would like to see translated? Does anyone want to read this blog in another language? Tell us about it in the comments!