Sic transit gloria webserviceorum

[pne]

I’ve been using Kielikone’s WebTranSmart Finnish->English translation service for years, for the occasional word or odd text. So long, in fact, that I still haven’t used up the prepaid credits I deposited back when it was still in Finnish marks (so, before 2002… possibly several years before that, even).

Today, I saw that something was “wrong” because the SSL certificate had expired in April 2010. I poked around a bit and found an announcement that they’re moving to a new site. Apparently, the new service can’t be used prepaid (pay per word) but only by purchasing service 3 or 12 months at a time… with a considerably higher price, given the usage I had made of the service so far. (I suppose if I had been translating pages and pages of text a month, I’d be saving money, but I don’t see myself translating 3900 words a quarter.)

Ah well. Guess I’ll be using up the credit I have by October, before they shut down their service, and I suppose it’ll be Google Translate from then on. (Which didn’t exist back then, at all.)