When it comes to online translation, more isn't necessarily better.

The last time this site took a look at online translation, late in 1998, AltaVista was one of the very few sites to offer free online translation to or from Spanish. Since then, the number of sites dedicated to online translation has increased to at least half a dozen, while numerous other sites offer translation as a secondary service.

AltaVista's translations in 1998 were awkward at best. More than two years later — and that's a long time in Internet time — they still are. And so are the translations offered by AltaVista's competitors.

We tested several of the major online translation services by taking the English and Spanish versions of an article written earlier this year for the site. Both the English and Spanish versions of the article are fairly straightforward, and they are absent of slang and similar peculiarities that can make translation fairly difficult. But the translators still had difficulty. If you'd like to see the translations that three of the major translators came up with, check the links in the box accompanying this story. As you can see, while all the translators make major mistakes, they don't make the same mistakes.

Some areas where the translators had difficulty wouldn't be particularly challenging for even a beginning Spanish student, and most intermediate students probably could come up with a better translation than the online translators, especially if armed with a dictionary. The best that can be said of the online translators is that they're fast — the translation comes almost as quickly as the page can be loaded with a dial-up connection. Most of the translation sites let you translate an entire Web page merely by pasting in its URL, and most also allow you to paste in a limited amount of text.

Here are some of the areas where the translators did poorly:

• Starting with the subheadline, the translators couldn't tell that "Black History Month" refers to black history rather than a black month.
• Context that might provide a clue to the meaning of a word was often ignored. The Spanish for "in recognition of Black History Month" became "on reconnoitering of the Month than Tale Raven" in one translator. Also, the verbs saber and conocer were sometimes confused when translating "know."
• Prepositions were especially difficult for the translators to determine. De, which in the original usually meant "of," was frequently translated as "than."
• Synonyms also were confused, and one case an English homonym was used. "Was born" became fue llevado or "was borne" in one translation to Spanish.
• Some translation was obviously done word for word with little regard for sentence structure. "The four fled" became el cuatro huido or "the fled four" in one translation, and el moro, "the Moor," became "the I dwell" in another.
• While the InterTran translator offered the advantage of giving alternate translations for most words, the main translations it gave were often weak and even grammatically incorrect. It often used the wrong gender in Spanish, for example, giving the correct gender as an alternative.
• All the translators are limited by the size of their dictionaries, which seem to be small. When a word isn't in the dictionary, the translators typically leave it untranslated. Among the dictionary gaps: one translator didn't know that búho is the Spanish word for "owl."
• The translators weren't able to distinguish names from words that needed to be translated. Thus Cabeza de Vaca, known by that name in both Spanish and English, became Cow's Head or Head of Cow in the translations to English.
• Spanish doesn't require subjects of sentences if the subjects can be deduced from the context. But the translators often weren't capable of figuring out the subject when translating into English.

In short, you shouldn't count on an online translator in any case where comprehension, much less precision, is important. Certainly, any translation intended for publication requires additional work; the output of an online dictionary barely qualifies as a rough draft. Developments in artificial intellilgence have yet to be applied fully to online translation, which most of the time can do little more than provide a gist of what was said on the original language.