September 28, 2000

Watching the Web

Auto Safety Reports, Flamenco,
Ratings of Financial Soothsayers

By ANDREA PETERSEN
Staff Reporter of THE WALL STREET JOURNAL

Auto Safety

Natl.Highway Traffic Safety Admin.
www.nhtsa.dot.gov¹

With all of the recent news of tire failures and rollover accidents, people may be pondering if the cars they drive are safe. Produced by a division of the U.S. Department of Transportation, this site has tips on buying a safer car, databases of safety recalls and consumer complaints and some difficult-to-understand crash-test results. Users can search a recall database by make, model and year of car. A search for the 2000 Honda Odyssey minivan yields four different recalls including one relating to a defect that could blow an electrical fuse and another notifying owners that a faulty latch could cause the vans'sliding doors to open suddenly. "An unrestrained rear-seat passenger could fall out of an open door of a moving vehicle and be seriously injured or killed," the recall notice cautions. A Honda spokesman says there have been no injuries reported relating to the doorlatch defect. Responding to the language of the safety recall, he says, "That's probably a worst-case scenario." The consumer-complaint database has car owners' tales of woes on a dizzying array of problems including stories of lemon accelerators, power windows and air bags.

Crashtest.com
www.crashtest.com²

This no-frills site gets crash-test results from a number of sources (including U.S., European and Asian government organizations and some insurance groups) and combines them into one user-friendly safety rating for dozens of car makes. Each car model gets an overall rating of excellent, good, acceptable, marginal or poor. The site also shows drilled-down ratings for injury rates, death rates, head-on crashes and side crashes.

Financial Soothsaying

Validea.com
www.validea.com³

Investor John Reese as looking for a watchdog organization that rated analysts' and financial pundits' stock picks. When he didn't find one, he created his own. The result is Validea.com. The site follows the recommendations and comments of a cornucopia of sources -- from Merrill Lynch analyst Henry Blodget to the Stock Focus column in Forbes magazine and CNBC's Squawk Box. Users can search by source or by ticker symbol. Validea.com compares the average return of sources' picks to the S&P 500, gives a summary of their recent investment ideas and lists both their best- and worst-performing picks. It also grants the source a rating of between one (worst) and five (best) light bulbs. Most of the sources' comments are gleaned from quotes in the press. I didn't see any comments from analyst reports or other documents. The site has one glaring omission: There are no biographies of the sources.

Flamenco

Flamenco-world.com
www.flamenco-world.com⁴

While salsa and bossa nova have had their pop-culture resurgence in the U.S., flamenco aficionados are still most often travelers to southern Spain -- and the world-music section of Tower Records. This site (available in English and Spanish) is a big love note to flamenco. There are video clips and reviews of recent performances, critiques of new CDs, as well as news of happenings in the flamenco world. Check out "What's Flamenco" for a good primer on the origin of the music and dance. Ready to hit the dance floor? The site will sell you your very own castanets and red fan.

A Closer Look / translation.net and FreeTranslation.com

After almost three months of living in Mexico, I'm at the stage where I can get the gist of a newspaper story. But I still can't translate every word into English. So in a fit of frustration, I decided to check out some of the free translation services on the Web.

I took two sites for a test drive: translation.net and FreeTranslation.com. These services are passable for travelers or for those wanting to translate a letter from a distant cousin. I definitely wouldn't use them for business or anything that remotely requires accuracy. The translations are clunky and too literal at best. Sometimes they are incomprehensible. Translation.net posts a warning: "Not intended for business, professional or legal use. User assumes all risk and responsibility for use."

I used the services to translate from Spanish to English the beginning of a newspaper article. While both of the translations were garbled, translation.net (www.translation.net⁵) did the best job. It mixed up pronouns, turning "his" into "its" and "he" into "it." It also left a handful of words in Spanish. But with a little creativity, the translation was understandable. Translation.net hawks translation software and portable translation devices. It will translate sentences free between English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese or Spanish.

FreeTranslation.com (www.freetranslation.com⁶) offers a similar service, though I found its translation less clean than translation.net's. (FreeTranslation.com will also translate from English to Norwegian.) The site also will translate an entire Web page. The results are pretty comic. I used the service to translate the home page of the Spanish-language portal ElSitio.com into English. The result was a bunch of gibberish such as this headline for a story offering romance advice, "Preparing you for a watched romantic." Also, the site wasn't entirely translated. Instead, sentences were a funky mix of Spanish and English.

Write to Andrea Petersen at andrea.petersen@wsj.com⁷