Searching the web for material in other languages

Tips on finding relevant material on the web in languages other than English

It can be difficult to find relevant material in languages other than English. Here are a few tips:

The following links will each open in a new browser window.

1. Alta Vista Babel Fish Translation
http://babelfish.altavista.com/
Enter text and select From and To languages or translate an entire web page

2. Anzwers
http://www.anzwers.com.au/
While Anzwers doesn't provide the facility to limit searches by language, it does have good coverage of Australian sites and it is easy to limit the search to Australian sites. Try putting in the subject plus the name of the language. eg. Centrelink Greek

3. Go to the relevant site and check to see if they have material in the relevant language This is probably the most effective way to search for materials in other languages at present. eg. go to Centrelink http://www.centrelink.gov.au/ and select the We speak your language link

4. Metadata
Use of metadata provides the potential to limit searches by a particular language. Dublin Core metadata standard has a language field which uses the international code to specify the language of the resource. While metadata isn't yet widely used by search engines, there is the potential to create gateway sites based on metadata. With this in mind site web page developers should use the language metadata tag.

For more about multilingual information on the web see How to put multilingual information on the web - some resources

Source: Prepared by Sue Scott, Law Foundation of New South Wales, for the seminar Providing multilingual information via the web held June 1999. 
http://www3.lawfoundation.net.au/olap/about/index.html