Automatic language translation

[woody-soft]

As for storage of the translated texts: Are they retrieved and stored at the client's cache, or are they retrieved by the server once to fill some sort of translation table, which is then stored at the client?

For example: your language selector shows "Deutsche" for "German", which is syntactically wrong (equivalent for "those Germans"), the correct caption would be "German". Yes nitpicking But I assume that this is retrieved from the Google translator?
Thus, if I have some captions getting wrong by automatic translation: is there some way to just populate the "translation table" for empty results, so that we could correct some terms, and get the rest automaticly?

[barrymavin]

Yes they are stored on the client in a cache just like any other browser content is.

No it was not from google translate. Thats a fixed list of languages supported that i added support for. I will correct these in due course. Its still under development.

No there isn't. If you don't want to use it don't. Write your own custom text translator.

The translations are sometimes not to simple as captions can contain {macros} and "badge" counts etc so this is also taken care of.

Give it a try and it can be refined with constructive feedback.

[woody-soft]

Hi Barry,
would it be possible to get a function to call that "TranslationService", so that we don't need to fiddle around with Google directly etc?

[barrymavin]

Hi Woody,

Not sure i understand what you mean? Do you mean is there a function that does all the work with google translate for you that you can call? or do you mean is there a way to bypass google translate?

As i said i'm currently working on this and i can show you how to "correct" translations. These are stored on the client but there is a way for you to update the cached result for a particular word or phrase.

[barrymavin]

This is progressing well.

I now have all messages, tooltips, search panel operators and dynamic section headers and page headers being translated dynamically.

On selecting your preferred language it is remembered across all your apps but can be changed at any time.

Translations are cached locally on the client in localStorage. If you need to adjust these you can do it in the app ready delegate like this.

window.localStorage.setItem(lang + ":" + english_text_to_translate, your_new_translated_text);
window.localStorage.setItem(lang + ":" + english_text_to_translate, your_new_translated_text);
etc

lang should be specified as per ISO 639-1 codes

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ISO_639-1_codes

So germany is "de" etc

See attached. PS I've used Thai in these examples as its one of the languages i can read and write other than english.

[woody-soft]

Hi Barry,
yes I was hoping to have a simple built-in function to hide the Google-API tasks, thus if I build a multilanguage Desktop app, it could then get used to first populate the needed translated strings of my language table. Thus I wouldn't need to translate everything manually, but only need to correct some misformed strings. Maybe this ER isn't directly related to your WebApp integration, but more towards a global helper function.

[barrymavin]

This functionality is only with web/mobile apps as I feel it’s important for delivering apps from the cloud.

However... you could build a small web app that uses built-in functions that I’ve added to the web framework. This is internal currently I’m not sure I want to document it for general use.

[HankFay]

HI Barry,

I imagine that Woody is anticipating a customer that says "no way we are allowing queries to google" and thinking that if the method that goes out to google were exposed as an oApp attribute, a substitute method could be substituted. I think that would be very handy for a variety of reasons.

Hank

[barrymavin]

Hi hank

Thats what the app text translator does.

[avianmanagement]

Having used multi lingual stuff in my existing app I found that auto translation by google for phrases in messages just did not translate properly.

For simple captions it was very good 99% of the time, but even then did not always work

Ours translated and saved to a table which was where the app got it's messages captions etc from.

Once we went in by hand and checked and corrected those that needed correcting it all worked really well.

Auto translate first time round is really fantastic, but if the result were stored in a table and taken from there in future it would work really well I feel.

Example

"In house name" used for an animal on forms

The German translates to "In the house name"

many languages have special words or phrases for a short sentence we have in English