Hello
I have a site in development that loads photos with a title and description
I wish to make a foreign language version of the site.
This is written in MS Silverlight.
I’d like to auto-detect the language (if possible) and translate the titles and description – is this possible?
I do not mean do this online, at a web site – but thru a tool built into the program, that seamlessly translates the titles.
Is this kind of task feasible?
Thank you in advance for any help,
John
Google for a piece of software called DJuggler
there is a free personal edition or the full one with a 30 day trial.
It is intended for specilaist screen-scraping however it can read & write
to local files as well. So you could make it read the titles & descriptions
then run them through the Google translate api online and save the
translation back to your PC.
Comes with working demos for each command, very easy to use
and programming is very much like old school Basic with loops & GOTO
commands.
An automatic translation tool for full texts will only be able to make half sense. A full human performed translation is the only thing that’s 75% and up reliable. It seems that what you’re looking for is similar to a subtitle translation tool, like Subtitle Workshop, only for HTML formats. Keep in mind that tools like these can only help you in a technical way. Linguistically, you’re on your own.
I agree with Itmitică. Google’s translation tool is pretty good, but no automated tool will give you the quality of translation that a human translator can achieve. That’s especially true in the case of short pieces of text such as your captions. That’s because modern translation tools work by translating words or phrases in their context, and short captions won’t have sufficient context to make that possible.
With an automatic translation, you always run the risk of looking unprofessional - or, at least, silly. If the website is important to you - for example, if it affects the success of your business - pay the money for a proper human translation.
Mike