Senkov kutak

Automatic statistical translation tools like Google Translate are getting better and better. They still often produce nonsensical and grammatically incorrect translations (depending on available language corpus, I guess), but the translations can be used to understand the crux of the text.

So, what happens if we try to apply these tools to translating software (in specific, translating gettext potfiles, which is the most widespread way of providing i18n in free software I know of)? Might be good, might be bad, and it will probably be hilarious ;-)

So, that’s my new pet project, googtext, does. It’s a small wrapper around Google AJAX Language API that allows users to upload their potfiles, extracts the message ids, passes them through the language api, and saves the resulting message to a new potfile the user gets to download.

Translations generated by googtext should certainly be redacted by a real person, but I think it’s sometimes easier to improve upon a bad translation than start from scratch (depending on the situation), so this might have some use (or just might be funny :) So, try it and let me know what you think in the comments.

The entire code for this is in the public domain, so if you want to play with the code, you can download it here. Since I couldn’t find any python module for Language API, I’ve made a thin wrapper myself (gtranslate module). There’s also the googtext utility itself (commandline), and the accompanying PHP upload script and HTML pages.

Have fun!