Show HN: Longest Translation – Handy utility for multi language designs

http://www.longesttranslation.com

by clloyd • 11 years ago

21 20 11 years ago

Simple, useful, and well executed.

Thanks for sharing! (or... Mübadiləsi üçün təşəkkür edirik!)

My one thought is that string length in pixels is more important than character count, but you sidestep that issue by showing all the results. You can easily see if one is longer even though it has fewer characters.

clloyd7• 11 years ago

Thanks for the feedback DanielStraight! Yep definitely a great idea and something I want to do!

kpatel79• 11 years ago

What do you use to translate and what is the quality rate on it?

clloyd7• 11 years ago

Underneath it is currently using the Yandex API, mainly due to it's generous free tier. Can't speak to the quality myself, but it does the job as a quick tool for simple translations.

dEnigma• 11 years ago

I just played with it for a while and the German translations often were pretty bad ("Essen sie nicht, dass" for "Don't eat that!", when "Essen Sie das nicht!" or "Iss das nicht!" would be correct)

clloyd7• 11 years ago

As a quick explanation. Very simple utility for quickly seeing what is the longest translation (by number of characters) for a specific word/phrase.

Plan to keep this online until I hit my API call limit then will post the source over the weekend!

Enjoy!

wodenokoto• 11 years ago

You might want to look into actual horizontal space. Visually the Japanese and Chinese translations takes a lot more space than the character count would have you believe.

anentropic• 11 years ago

wow the front-end makes a separate ajax call for each language - efficient!

clloyd7• 11 years ago

anentropic: I liked the effect of when a translation appearing as soon as they return. Not the most efficient decision I know! :D

matthewmacleod• 11 years ago

You always have the option to not be sarcastic about it, and instead point out where efficiencies could be made. Being nice doesn't cost anything.

logicallee2• 11 years ago

It's almost as though efficiency isn't the main priority in a toy app that returns automated translations sorted by length.

userulluipeste• 11 years ago

I've tried "once upon a time there was a king" (the first common words in a lot of fairy tales), which in Romanian should have been translated in five words - "a fost odată un împărat". This tool gives me "cu mult timp în urmă a Trăit-o a fost regele" - double of that amount (and I stop before getting into comments about the translated content itself)!

clloyd7• 11 years ago

Thanks userulluipeste! It's great to get feedback, seems Yandex API isn't the best, very interested if there's any others people have had a good experience with?

logicallee2• 11 years ago

Come on, you can hardly fault an automated language tool for not translating something idiomatically. Try your comment, and see how it does.

Grue3• 11 years ago

Can you add an option to select the input language? For example if I submit a Japanese phrase, all the languages give identical results, which is the phrase itself.

clloyd7• 11 years ago

Yep, on the feature list, currently it's limited to en -> Other only. Also looking at selecting the target languages so you only see the languages you want.

KMuncie• 11 years ago

Very nice but your missing the worst offender... Greenlandic :)

Checkout the most translated website in the world to see some of these languages in action http://jw.org - Here is Greenlandic http://www.jw.org/kl/

clloyd7• 11 years ago

Wow! Greenlandic looks awesome! Never had the pleasure of supporting greenland yet. Limited by API support currently...

motdiem• 11 years ago

Well done, this is actually well executed and quite useful to quickly check translations for menus, dialog boxes and so on

bx_• 11 years ago

The Chinese for "hello" was sort of correct. It returned 喂 on the bottom of the list, but that's really "hello?" like answering the phone, not 你好 which is actually hello. I was surprised by its selection there.

Show HN: Longest Translation – Handy utility for multi language designs

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