Online Translation

Question

I am trying to develop an online translation service (sort of a personal challenge) but I have been looking for any guidelines or any way to see how it should be done and so far I have come up with nothing so. In a nutshell, does anybody knows where to find a service, code or explanation of how online translation works and/or guidelines for making one?

Answer 1

You could take a look at a similar project: Machine Translation

Answer 2

You can have a look at the codes of Spanish English, which is an online translation site.

Answer 3

For a "personal challenge" this project seems way too big. You would need a huge dictionnary and very sophisticated translation algorithms. Or are you asking if there are APIs to existing translation services?

Answer 4

Decent online translation services work as follows:

1. Email company with text to translate
2. They get humans to translate it.
3. Company sends translated text back in another email
4. At some point in the above, money exchanges hands.

Automated translation services tend to not work well, due to the huge amount of information required to translate text other than just the text itself, and issues that arise when there isn't an accurate translation for something between 2 languages.

Answer 5

This is a big undertaking. For personal use I use google translate. It does not do a great job, but enough I can get a decent understanding. At work we use COMIDOC, a fairly expensive commercial service. Its not perfect and we have to do a lot of work setting up specialized translations of technical sentences.