[Libreoffice-bugs] [Bug 34058] Translation feature through external services

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=34058

Yannick W. <yannick.warnier at beeznest.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
            Summary|Translation feature         |Translation feature through
                   |                            |external services

--- Comment #1 from Yannick W. <yannick.warnier at beeznest.com> 2011-08-14 14:13:55 PDT ---
I'd like to add to this request with a little extension.

Wordreference.com offers a per-term translation of really good quality, but
does not (to my kowledge) offer web services.

translate.google.com offers web services as well as a text block translation of
arguably not excellent but acceptable basic translation.

The Google translator toolkit
(http://translate.google.com/toolkit/list?hl=en#translations/active) is a bit
better at that. It also allows you to send an entire document (in a series of
formats including .odt) and supposedly translates it for you then gives it back
to you.

However, that last feature breaks most of the style of any document you would
submit to them.

When translating a long user/technical documentation (for open-source projects
in particular because this is really missing in general terms), a first part of
the translation time is spent on finding basic phrasing of what is written in
the other language.

I personally think it would be great to have a feature to translate one
paragraph at a time, using the translate.google.com API and maintaining basic
formatting: alignments, bold, italic and specific styles applied (but excluding
references, index markup, etc in a first version).

There are many extensions I can see developing on top of that later on, but
that would be a first shot.

So the idea, in short would be, for the user:

* Configure a Google translate API (or any other translation API, but for
simplicity I'm developing the following based on one specific provider)
* Configure (somewhere) the original language of the document
* Configure the language of the document as the destination translation (normal
LibreOffice feature to set document language)
* Select a word or a whole paragraph
* Click-right and select "Translate through Google(TM)"
* The work or paragraph is changed, in-place, keeping all simple styling tags

On the back-end side, when the command is launched:

* Make sure the paragraph respects characters limitations, otherwise cut in
chunks (preferrably on phrases separators) or ask the user to select a smaller
part.
* Get the original document language
* Get the destination language
* Get the list of languages ("from" and "to") from Google and ensure there is a
match between local language defined and Google language
* Send a call to translate.google.com 's API
(http://code.google.com/apis/language/translate/overview.html) to translate the
paragraph
* Replace the selected text by the translated version returned by Google,
trying to maintain the style as much as possible

I have been translating documents for more than 120h in the last 45 days and I
think it would really reduce my work of about 20% to have this kind of feature.

As such, I am ready to put a $200 bounty on the development of this feature
(payable through PayPal). Check with me if this is still true if you take this
over in a long time.

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