"this gem is awesome".to_spanish # = "esta joya es impresionante"

by vrish88 • 16 years ago

94 43 16 years ago

dholowiski2• 16 years ago

This is why even us die hard php coders sometimes yearn for RoR. .to_spanish !

nwmcsween• 16 years ago

Not trying to be pedantic but the gem has nothing to do with ror - it just extends the string class and adds to_x methods for each language.

nowarninglabel• 16 years ago

http://code.google.com/p/gtranslate-api-php/

$gt = new Gtranslate; echo "Translating [Ciao mondo] Italian to English => ".$gt->it_to_en("Ciao mondo");

Tomek_7• 16 years ago

But still not as elegant as: echo "Ciao mondo"->it_to_en(); would be.

rbanffy• 16 years ago

I think your example demonstrates very well why one would yearn for Ruby. The ability to give an extra method to a base class allows you to build very expressive code.

edit: and, BTW, the to_spanish method is not defined in the https://github.com/jimmycuadra/to_lang/blob/master/lib/to_la... module.

dholowiski2• 16 years ago

Thank you for proving my point.

alxp• 16 years ago

Drupal's localization infrastructure is quite nice. Instead of 'echo' you use the function t() which lets users use a GUI to translate all tokens in a Drupal site.

callmeed2• 16 years ago

What's causing this?

    ruby-1.8.7-p302 > "Where is the bathroom?".to_spanish
    => "\302\277D\303\263nde est\303\241 el ba\303\261o?"

comron• 16 years ago

Listed under "Roadmap" in the readme is the following:

Investigate Unicode support for Ruby 1.8. to_lang has only been tested with 1.9.

Do you have a copy of 1.9 to test with?

callmeed2• 16 years ago

Ah, yes. Much better:

    ruby-1.9.2-p0 > "Where is the bathroom?".to_spanish
    => "¿Dónde está el baño?"

Thanks

rsoto• 16 years ago

Accents and special chars, I think it is trying to output "¿Dónde está el baño?"

carbon8• 16 years ago

Ruby 1.8 displays non-ascii characters in the shell using octal escape sequences. \302\277 is ¿, \303\263 is ó and so forth. It should be fine to work with (eg, saving to a database or displaying in a template) as long as you know the encoding. I just glanced at the code, but it looks like it just takes whatever the Google Translate API gives it, which I'm guessing is UTF-8.

djhworld• 16 years ago

how does the gem failover if the machine it is being used on isn't connected to the internet?

getsat2• 16 years ago

You would get a SocketError exception from getaddrinfo because HTTParty (which uses Net::HTTP) can't lookup the hostname. If the hostname is already resolved, you'd get a Errno::EHOSTUNREACH exception from connect because there is no route to Google's servers.

Uchikoma2• 16 years ago

Leaky abstraction

http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.htm...

burgerbrain2• 16 years ago

In other words, "poorly".

alvatar2• 16 years ago

Just in case you didn't know, and you have plans to actually use Google Translate for translating web pages into Spanish... please don't. I haven't seen a single sentence with more than 3-4 words translated properly from English to Spanish. Even the examples shown in the README make no sense in Spanish.

Tomek_7• 16 years ago

Really? From my experience English to Spanish translation works pretty well in Google Translate. I've been using it a lot when I started to live in Spain and my Spanish skills were not too great yet: people were actually complementing me for how good my (written) Spanish is and were in huge shock when they met me in person and it turned out that I barely can formulate any sentence. True story.

ollysb• 16 years ago

A few years back an ex-girlfriend of mine did an erasmus year over in Spain and I ended up making friends with a whole bunch of people that I could barely converse with. They've always been very impressed at far my Spanish has come in IM, thank you babel fish.

paradoja• 16 years ago

It depends... most of what's translated is understandable for a native speaker, but it will be clear that it wasn't written by one. If you need to communicate with a Spanish speaker, it will work quite well. If you need to write a brochure or something formal... better get someone to translate for you.

Uchikoma2• 16 years ago

I assume Spanish people are quite polite.

compay2• 16 years ago

"my Spanish skills were not too great yet"

"From my experience English to Spanish translation works pretty well"

I think there's a connection.

alvatar2• 16 years ago

"Very cool gem!".to_spanish -> "Muy fresco joya!" This sounds like it would in English: "Fresh very jewel!". Makes no sense in any way, neither south american nor european Spanish. I'm sure there are many cases that it helps, and it actually did help me in many cases, even for learning German. But eventually, for writing something I always have to check the grammar with a native german, because grammar changes the whole meaning or sense. For a web page, I think it doesn't help reach the spanish community.

stevenbedrick2• 16 years ago

My dissertation research involved using (and, most importantly, evaluating) GT for certain medical text problems (going from EN->ES), and I found that its performance is highly domain-dependent (i.e., the quality of its translations depends a lot on what kind of input text you're feeding it). Furthermore, I found that whether or not it's "good enough" depends heavily on the user, specifically that user's level of proficiency in English.

GT is better than a lot of machine translation systems, but it still falls victim to a number of common problems that face such systems. Specifically, I've run into a lot of major word-sense-disambiguation issues, especially when working with the sort of short snippets of text that the gem in question uses as examples. Basically, that sort of short bit of text is a worst-case scenario for statistical machine translation, since there's so little context. Google generally does much better with longer runs of text than it does with short phrases.

jbpr• 16 years ago

Another similar project: https://github.com/caius/gtranslate

swah2• 16 years ago

Translate fail already... user won't understand that 'joya' means a Ruby gem :)

burgerbrain2• 16 years ago

In context, and with the slightest amount of deductive reasoning, I don't see why they wouldn't.

swah2• 16 years ago

Sure, but those can read basic english too.

stevenbedrick2• 16 years ago

Since this gem appears to use Google's public API, one important thing to keep in mind is that there's probably a hard limit on the amount of text that can be translated at one go. I've found that throwing more than a thousand or so characters at GT's API results in their server throwing "URI too long" errors, since it only works via HTTP GET.

Disclaimer: This might have changed in the five or six months since I last messed around with Google's API, or, alternatively, this gem could be doing something clever to try and get around the problem. Either way, I'd suggest checking it out.

alex_c• 16 years ago

From memory, other limitations include 100,000 characters per day, and limits on where the API can be used (e.g. can't use it for paid services).

mjuhl24• 16 years ago

This is cool, but no one should ever use this. I've used the google translator frequently, and while it's good, it always requires me to use my knowledge of the language I'm translating to in order to create a more correct and meaningful translation. If you really want a site or app that is multilingual, you need a human with good knowledge of the language to do your translations.

"this gem is awesome".to_spanish # = "esta joya es impresionante"

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