Thanks a lot, Tower of Babel

February 24, 2009 2:50 PM

I'm working on a post in which I'd like to use a certain article that provides useful and interesting background information, information I can't find anywhere else. Unfortunately this article is a PDF file... and in Spanish.

If it were a regular page I'd just toss it into Google Translate and link to that, but the PDF the article is in is too large. And Google hasn't yet crawled the file, so there's no translation available in their cache, either.

I did manage to extract the plain text from the PDF and ran that through Google Translate with serviceable results... but I can't find any way to link to the translation.

So, short of directing people to the Spanish PDF and leaving it up to them to extract and translate the text themselves, is there any acceptable way to include the translated text in my post that would not skirt the rules? I'm thinking some third-party site that will host small text files.

posted by Rhaomi to Etiquette/Policy at 2:50 PM (6 comments total)

If the article is copyrighted, a translation without permission of the copyright owner is likely to be a copyright infringement. Keep in mind that an actual copyright notice is not necessary for the article to by copyrighted.

I'd be fine with just posting the article, marking the link as to a Spanish-language PDF, even though I don't speak a word of Spanish myself. No skin off my back if those who can read Spanish want to discuss it. If you want to reach a wider audience than just Spanish-speaking MeFites, you might post a summary (not a translation) in the "more inside" part of the post.
posted by DevilsAdvocate at 3:06 PM on February 24, 2009

I use pasta to link to text files. Make sure you link to the original pdf as well.
posted by jessamyn (staff) at 3:23 PM on February 24, 2009 [1 favorite]

Whatever you do, don't type the pdf url into translate.google.com, it clogs the tubes.
posted by blue_beetle at 3:25 PM on February 24, 2009

Thanks a lot jessamyn, that's precisely what I was looking for. I'll be sure to link to the source, as well.

I'd also like to note that I just got a nice message from papafrita offering to translate the text personally free of charge. I decided against it, since it's a pretty long article (and I don't want to skirt the posting guidelines more than I have to), but I thought it was a cool gesture and deserved some kudos.
posted by Rhaomi at 3:44 PM on February 24, 2009

You've solved this already but just in case I'll gladly host some text gratis, I've got some bandwidth that I'm not using.
posted by Skorgu at 4:24 PM on February 24, 2009

I must say, Rhaomi, I love that you work on posts! Cheers, dude.
posted by gman at 6:34 PM on February 24, 2009