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Open Source Translation Project

Posted: Sat Apr 12, 2008 7:44 am
by SteelCurtain
I have an idea for an open source translation project. The goal would be to create a system where a bilingual person could open up a form and grab a whole or partial web page in one language (L1) and translate it to a second language (L2) . The implementation would show a paragraph at a time of L1 and create input boxes that the translation can be typed into. The reason for input boxes is that we would want to recreate the HTML formatting of the source document
in the translated destination document without the translator needing to know any html coding.

I have written a start on this project but I am not a properly trained programmer and am getting out of my depth. I was using phpxml with the dom object model and could handle simple sentences ok but I am not really good enough to carry this though and it would make for great open source project as there is a great need for a system like this.

My personal need for it is to have my readers be able to translate my online books and convert them to web sites in their own language, see http://www.chromatography-online.org for the books. The book text portion of these pages are contained in a database and should be easy to send to a form. Since the text here has a lot of equations, Greek symbols, subscripts etc the html code gets quite complicated, also, the books themselves were converted to html from word docs using the MS export as filtered html which had to be cleaned up.

I would be happy to host this project on my server or it could be a sourceforge project. If you are interested, need more info., know someone who would like to take it on please let me know.

You can email me direct if you like at reese [@] library4science [dot] com

Re: Open Source Translation Project

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:28 pm
by SteelCurtain
Hmm, lots of readers but no replies. Could I ask for opinions, does this not look feasible or does it not appear to be of miuch use or perhaps I haven't explained it well? I really would appreciate your help even if its just suggestions on where I might look for help.

Re: Open Source Translation Project

Posted: Mon Apr 21, 2008 1:32 pm
by SteelCurtain
Oops, meant to say thank you to Jcart for the spam protection. :D

Re: Open Source Translation Project

Posted: Tue Apr 22, 2008 1:56 pm
by Kieran Huggins
You might consider getting people started on a translation using the Google Language API:

http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/

and then have translators fix up the resulting translation. It's also important to have each translation tied to a revision id so people know when and if the original has been changed.