Automated page translation with Google

Walter Bright newshound at digitalmars.com
Fri Mar 23 11:54:15 PDT 2007


Unknown W. Brackets wrote:
> An option, although a bit of work, would be to load the code snippets in 
> a separate request using JavaScript.  Unfortunately, this would require 
> JavaScript (although alternative links could be provided to the same 
> content.)  It's definitely nicer than using iframes, but not good enough...
> 
> If you're using JavaScript code to make the translation happen, this 
> might be reasonable.  All it would have to do is reload the original 
> (untranslated) HTML and replace the sections of code with the originals. 
>  That wouldn't be too much work, actually.
> 
> It's also possible to provide the translation through the server side, 
> using a proxy and caching thus allowing you to control it to your 
> desires... but this would probably be overdoing it.

It sounds like too much work!

> That said, in my previous projects I've been very impressed with 
> community-driven translation efforts.  I mean, we had something like 35 
> volunteer translations of about 250k of text.  That's nothing compared 
> to the probably 1500k of text to be translated for D...

The real problem is that the documentation changes regularly, 
invalidating the translation work.

> Even so, automatic translation just cannot compare to the real thing. 
> Not without smarter routines than we have now.

I know. But it's:

1) effortless
2) always in sync with the constant changes to the documentation
3) reasonable to expect google will get better at it over time, and such 
improvements will be automatically incorporated



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