terms of use

Language Translation Disclaimer

The ASN website language translation service utilizes the Google Language AJAX software. The ASN has made reasonable efforts in order to provide accurate translations, however, no automated or computerized translation is perfect and is not intended to replace human or traditional translation methods. The official text is the English version of the ASN website. Any discrepancies or differences created in the translation are not binding and have no legal effect for compliance or enforcement purposes. If any questions arise concerning the accuracy of the information presented by the translated verison of the website, please refer to the English version of the website, which is the official version.

Frequently Asked Questions

Below are some frequently asked questions concerning the ASN website translate service. If you would like more information, please contact Hal Nesbitt.

How does this service work?

The ASN website translation service uses the Google Language AJAX API to implement the translation. This service is provided free-of-charge by Google. A JavaScript is used to break up the text of the page and send it to the Google translation service, which is then returned in the requested language and is overlaid on top of the English version.

What browsers work with this service?

The ASN website translation service currently works on Firefox, Seamonkey, Safari, IE7+, and certain versions of Opera.

Why is only part of the webpage translated?

Different languages have different word lengths, so any block of text whose length provides for the structure of the page itself, such as the tab menu and footer, were excluded from the translation to ensure the integrity of the page structure.

The news items in the RSS feed and the right side items are actually external items being displayed within the current page and therefore cannot be translated using this service.

Also, the AJAX script rewrites the HTML portions of the page. Certain elements that were created with other programs, such as Flash and images, are not read by the script and will not be translated.

Why does it only translate one page at a time?

Currently, the page translation preference is not carried from page to page. This is because we want members to view the official page first, and then translate the page as a matter of convenience, rather than as the de facto method of viewing the pages. A cookie based system for holding user preferences is being considered and may be implemented in the future.

Why doesn't the language I chose display properly?

In order to view a the page in a particular language, your browser must have that language pack installed. You can learn more about language packs and download languages for from your browser's website.

Why did half of my text disappear?

The Google language service is limited to 500 characters at one time. The ASN pages uses jquery (a JavaScript library) to parse the text of the page based on punctuation symbols (.,;:) to break up the text into chunks for translating. Sometimes a block of text will be a run-on sentence and will not have any symbols that are identifiable to the script for breaking up. In this case, the block of text that is sent is over 500 characters and Google rejects it and returns a null value, hence the missing text. In this situation, please refer to the English version to get the most accurate information.

I translated a page but now the tabs and/or menu won't work. What do I do?

Some pages, including the 'Press' and 'Links' pages, require you to do a refresh before viewing other content. For example, if you are viewing the JASN tab in the Press page and you translate it, you must refresh the page to move to the CJASN tab and then you must re-translate it if you wish to view the new tab in another language.

Why did my browser just lock up or freeze?

The script parses the text of the page into 500 character chunks and continuously sends them back and forth until the whole page has been processed. This script can be very processor intensive. If you computer does not have a powerful enough processor to handle these cycles, or not enough RAM to run them, then it can lock up or freeze. In this case, you can close the browser with Ctrl-Alt-Delete to bring up task manager and end the process. After restarting the browser it is recommended that you do not use the translation service again on that page.

Where can I find more information on the translation software?

To learn more about the Google Language API, please visit http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/.