RSS
Our website contains an enormous amount of content, including over 85,000 articles and posts totaling more than 70 million words, with our 1900 HTML books adding another 200 million words. Much of this material is highly controversial and of considerable potential importance, not easily found elsewhere. But except for a few dozen of the more important pieces that have been translated by volunteers, the entire collection is in English. Although that language is widely used throughout the world, according to some estimates it is only spoken by about a quarter of Internet users, which substantially restricts the effective distribution of our material.
Fortunately, software translation systems have been steadily improving, and I’m very pleased to say that we’ve now added a simple feature that allows the entire website and all of its content to be automatically translated into a variety of major world languages, including French, Spanish, German, Russian, Chinese, Hindi, and Arabic, all based upon the established Google translation technology.
This new system is extremely easy to use. There is now a drop-down field located towards the top of the right Sidebar which defaults to English, and changing it almost instantaneously converts the entire website and all of its content to the specified language. Once set, all website pages subsequently visited are converted to that language almost instantaneously, even including very long comment-threads. Links to a particular language version of the website is provided by an additional URL language specifier included in the “URL Link” next to the language control field, thus easily allowing users to send language-specific links to others. For example:
- Link to French version of Home page:
https://www.unz.com/?lang=fr - Link to Russian version of this article:
https://www.unz.com/pescobar/ukraine-redux-war-russophobia-and-pipelineistan/?lang=ru - Link to Hebrew version of this article:
https://www.unz.com/article/the-anti-semitic-birth-of-the-zionist-state/?lang=iw
Although the quality of this automatic translation is obviously far below the human variety, several people have tested it in different languages and found it to be reasonably good. This now allows us to fully globalize the huge volume of content-material we have accumulated.
Meanwhile, I’ve now also added two additional eBooks, with one containing my major Covid-19 articles and the other my historical analysis of organized crime in America. Just as with my previous eBooks, these are available in both ePub and Kindle/Mobi formats, and are freely available for downloading and redistribution. I’m also providing an updated edition of my Race/Crime eBook, which now incorporates my closely-related analysis of Hispanic crime in America. And although I first released my collection of ebooks more than two months ago, they are still being downloaded at a rate of several hundred times per week, which is really quite gratifying.
American Pravda: Our Covid-19 Catastrophe
Was the Epidemic the Result of Biowarfare Blowback?
16,100 Words • EPub Format⬇ • Mobi/Kindle Format⬇
American Pravda: The Power of Organized Crime
How the Alumni of the Chicago Syndicate Seized Power in California, Corporate America, and the Federal Government
13,000 Words • EPub Format⬇ • Mobi/Kindle Format⬇
Race and Crime in America
The Unspoken Statistical Reality of Urban Crime Over the Last Quarter Century
12,800 Words • EPub Format⬇ • Mobi/Kindle Format⬇
These and all my previous eBooks are conveniently located in the page listed in the standard sidebar:
English
Arabic
Chinese (Simplified)
Dutch
French
German
Hebrew
Hindi
Italian
Japanese
Korean
Persian
Polish
Portuguese
Russian
Spanish
Swedish
Turkish
Vietnamese
If a person really makes an effort, he can figure out a way to get parts of these ebooks in PDF format. But why make it so hard? Why not provide the complete books in PDF format?
Really, now, a person really needn’t make much of an effort; it’s not hard at all. There are free online converters, for example
OnlineConverter.com/epub-to-pdf.
PDF formats of the American Pravda series have been available here for years, along with miscellanea like Unz’s long essay on ‘The Spartan Naval Empire’, which I quite enjoyed reading.
Although other than the often dubious quality of Google Translate itself, I might add that when another language is selected, the webpage has a very irritating way of briefly displaying in English as one scrolls down, before suddenly re-rendering into Hebrew, Russian or whatnot.
@RonUnz
Out of curiosity, what languages do you speak or read to a degree of fluency? You already stated elsewhere that Wikipedias statement that ‘Unz grew up speaking Yiddish’ (which seemed suspect to me, I doubt Yiddish is now spoken regularly anywhere outside of Hasidic communities) was complete nonsense, presumably, the rest of that entire article is full of otiose or scurrilous claims as well.
It seems natural to assume you know Spanish, and recall Ancient Greek from undergraduate studies to some vestigial degree? It was once that case that anyone seriously interested in Antiquity would need to know German for access to much of the best scholarship, but I suppose even in the 70s that was already receding into the past.
Exactly. Ebook (any kind of text, really) to pdf is easy. Converting pdfs into legible ebook formats, on the other hand…
And if you don’t use an standalone ereader or smartphone/ tablet app for reading, and want to read it on a laptop/ desktop (and are too lazy to convert it) — just use Calibre. It’s not hard.
Dear Mr. Unz,
in case you don’t know it yet, here is another good translation engine (neural net based):
https://deepl.com
Rumour has it’s superior to the google translator…
Pretty much none I’m afraid. I’ve never been any good at languages, nor had any strong interest in studying them.
I did take four years of French back in high school, and got a 5 on the AP, but very little of it remains. Given my strong interest in Classical History, I also took a year of Latin in college and a semester of Ancient Greek, but that was decades ago and has almost completely disappeared. And other than those bits, I’m afraid I’ve always been a monolingual Anglophone.
As for the Wikipedia nonsense, I think I once looked at my entry back about 20 years ago and since so much of it was totally incorrect, I’ve made it a point to never look again in order to avoid irritation. Given that there have been fairly lengthy (and largely accurate) profiles of me over the years in the NYT, TNR, LAT, and other MSM outlets, the Wikipedia mistakes just seemed inexcusable.
That’s because the Google module is translating each page on the fly, fast enough to be practical. The problem with using cached pages is that even if the cache were refreshed every hour on the most popular pages, the comments might significantly lag from the English version. And with more than a dozen languages and a very large number of widely used pages, the translation time might become substantial. I spent a couple of days trying that approach, but finally decided that on-the-fly translation was better.
The whole translation system certainly isn’t ideal, but I do think it’s “good enough” to be useful.
Ron,
Not Wikipedia “mistakes” but deliberate lies and distortions!
Go Ron! Thanks for all you do.
Can we blame Jimmy Wales for that?
This should be an extremely valuable boost in
spreading the influence of your content, Ron.
Many, many of us are in gratitude to you for the work
you have done and continue to do. Without it, I
for one could have faltered in my determination
to oppose the deformation of the good and true
with which we contend daily. Thanks to you.
Thanks, Ron.
I’ve played with the translate button a bit.
It’s very easy to use. The French translation is very good, much higher quality than I would have expected. It was correctly picking up little shades of meaning that I would have thought a computer would stumble on.
I only know a small bit of German, but, based on the small amount I do know, the German translation also seems to be quite good.
I don’t know enough of the other languages to offer an opinion on them.
Thanks for all you do for the betterment of humankind, Mr. Unz. You are one of my heroes.
You’re a good man, Ron Unz!!
I voted for you a couple of times here in CA. That said, until Unz.com, I always pegged you for not much more ideologically than a kind of moderate conservative, fine for CA, but not really one of the Remnant {of right-thinkers}. I now admit I was wrong. At the very least (and worst), you are among the very last old-fashioned liberals, the ones who question authority in pursuit of truth and nothing but the truth (even if imo they don’t always see what’s in front of them). More likely, however, you’re a real rightist publishing some alternative stuff from the Left to cover for your real goal, which is to publish and archive lots of increasingly verboten stuff from the Right.
Well, whatever your agenda, you’re performing a kind of national service. It’s not totally hyperbolic to think that Trump should have considered you for a Presidential Medal of Freedom (especially when you look at all the bozos who’ve been awarded it). Thanks for this site.
Leon, you’re on to something with that Presidential Medal of Freedom suggestion for Ron’s extraordinary service to public debate and intellectual inquiry and archival collecting.
The Presidential MOF may be a bridge too far at this time. But, it’s not too early at all for people to consider just what Ron’s contributions have been for the purpose of some public recognition with at least the possibility of good mainstream media coverage.
The italian version is reasonably good, and comparable to the man-made translation of, for example, sakeritalia.net (saker site in italian). I have pointed friends to the site. I also note that strategicculture has the option for translation.
Unz Review is an oasis in the intellectual desert of the Internet. Thank you.
Thank you so much Ron Unz for all you do.
God bless you.
If you don’t believe in God or can’t find any religion, church denomination for intelligent, honorable White/Jewish people or others….
Well….
Let’s just honor a very good man who has done his best in these difficult times.
I’ve tried my best…
J Ryan
LeftbehindinChicago
I find it almost miraculous that the contents of a whole website can be instantly turned into another language, especiallly if you take the usual limitations of machine translation into account (Google for instance can only deal with 3000 characters at a time)
I checked up on the Dutch translation. It is quite reliable as far as vocubalary is concerned and that is the royal road to understanding a text. The sentence structure has retained some English particularities such as for instance the almost invariable togetherness of finite and infinite verb in the predicate (in Dutch they can be separated and often have to be separated to make “good Dutch”).
I can now tell some elderly former compatriots of mine about this function (contrary to the popular myth not all Dutch people find it easy to read English).
Thanks Ron – you achieve remarkable things.
This is a good question for those of us who have moved past the PC to a fully mobile platform and for whom the saved PDF is our only option when connectivity issues arise. How difficult is a “print as PDF” option?
Ever the pragmatist Ron. Thanks for the continual site improvements and congratulations on the translation tool. Have you given up hope for us anglophones and launched a ’hail mary’ hoping that the good folk of the Pampas and Andes (or Stanistan) will pick up the torch of liberty and truth since we’ve decided that it’s a giant turd?
The problem with heroes is that they rarely stand up to scrutiny.. They are, after all, as human as we are. Put them on a pedestal and find out that they were frequent flyers with Jeff Epstein.
For all I know, Ron may be the Messiah, the Jew who has been sent to save us. Right now, I am sticking with gratitude for the enormous gifts that he has, entirely on his own volition, imparted to humanity and hope that we aren’t going to censor and cancel him for it.
Awesome job, Mr Unz.
It would be really cool to, in the future as the webzine gets more foreign readers, get controversial authors from foreign countries to write about controversial topics in their region.
I’m thinking, controversial Vietnamese racists. Controversial Palestinian anti-Israelis. Controversial Shiites in Iran. Controversial Africans who have a beef with other Africans, Chinese, Europeans, etc.
Let a thousand crazy flowers bloom.
It’s somewhat unfortunate that you have a option for Chinese translation (interestingly Simplified Chinese) yet the translation is provided through Google. If you can find/use some other provider perhaps you can penetrate the mainland China market; seems this site is not yet “popular” enough to get noticed by the CCP censor so it might be still accessible there.
Hi, Ron. It appears you’ve gone beyond the original list of major wold languages noted above, eg by including Hebrew. Is it possible to add the Greek language to this list?
Bravo. C’est une bonne idée!
This site needs music criticism. It will attract more readers as music is not only a passion among many but a big part of culture and values.
It’s fairly easy to add Greek or other languages translated by Google, but too many of them would clutter up the system a little. If one or two more people second your request, I’ll be glad to do that.