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T A B L E__T A L K

I struggled with Russian for three years in high school, learning little more from the exquisitely painful process than the Russian terms for "I don't know" and "I don't understand." Hence I was never quite able to suspend my disbelief about "Star Trek's" Universal Translator -- the show's technological fix to the old Tower of Babel problem, an unobtrusive box that managed to convert even the strangest alien grunts into perfect (if at times somewhat melodramatic) English. I had no trouble, mind you, accepting phasers, transporters and warp-speed space travel -- but the idea that a little language box could accomplish more in an instant than I could manage in three awful years was somehow harder to take.

So when I first stumbled on to AltaVista's Translation Assistant, I had a little trouble believing it was real. The Translation Assistant does for Web surfing what "Star Trek's" translator did for deep-space exploration, translating Web pages (or simply swatches of text) from French (or German or Spanish or Portuguese or Italian) into English and vice versa. The service is quick, free and painless, and though the software is still in beta (as the AltaVistans are quick to point out), the results are nothing short of magical.

In an industry habitually given over to hype, the AltaVista people have been strangely hesitant to toot their own horn. Perhaps fearing an overwhelming crush of visitors, they haven't actively publicized their service, and they've been modest about its accomplishments. "Computerized translations often miss subtle meanings of words and don't accurately present many common sayings," a sort of disclaimer on the AltaVista Web site explains. "The AltaVista Translation Assistant provides you with a tool to translate a grammatically correct document into something comprehensible, but not perfect."

Sure, the software mangles a lot of what it gets its hands on. Some of what it delivers, of course, is utter gibberish: "It would leave his fall in the edge for a minute or two." "I am funker in a room of assembly and I licked film."

But as Dr. Johnson might have said, the wonder is that it works at all -- and that so much of the machine's output, however garbled, is at least roughly understandable. The summary of a German mystery story, translated into English: "Place of the action is first New York, later undertakes Van Dusen and Hatch a voyage round the world, while those they are constantly confronted with interesting kriminologischen problems. " (As you can see, some difficult words remain untranslated -- though their meaning is often quite clear from context.)

The automatic translator is likely to prove an unreliable instrument in situations that demand a certain degree of precision in language -- like international diplomacy, or the placing of take-out orders. Perhaps the easiest way to test for possible problems is to translate your request into the desired language -- and back again. Though this adds a second level of distortion to the first, it at least will give you a sense as to where the translation will most likely go astray.

I had few problems with basic food orders, but trouble multiplies quickly once you wander even a little bit off the beaten track. "Surf 'n' turf," translated into French and back again, becomes "grass of the vague beachcomber." And a simple request for "a half order of sweet and sour pork, extra rice, with a side order of pot stickers" becomes -- after translation into Italian and back -- an "order half of sweet pig and acid, additional rice, with a lateral order of the self-sticking papers of the pot." ("Pot stickers" prove troublesome in nearly every language, returning as everything from "gummed labels of the crucible" to "labels of the potentiometer." )

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N E X T_P A G E .|. When pick-up lines go through the translation grinder