Hello all
I have just uploaded a new app called Polyglot. It is based on the
Translate Languages
app written by Jamal Mazrui and at its heart is a utility called
tranlang.exe also
written by Jamal.
This app corrects a number of issues which exist in the Translate
Languages app and
has a number of new features. Here are the differences between Polyglot
and Translate
Languages:
The available languages and their codes are no longer hardcoded in the
app, but are read from a file when the app starts up. A second hotkey
has been added to refresh the language list from Microsoft's website.
That means that if new languages become available, you simply need to
press the hotkey and the list will be refreshed and will include any new
languages, so it will not be necessary for the app to be modified.
The language list and codes used by Microsoft differ from those used by
the old Google translator and that has not been updated in the Translate
Languages app, with the result that selecting some of those would cause
Translate Languages to crash. With the list now being downloaded from
Microsoft, that problem is eliminated.
The Microsoft translation API does not have the 500 character
restriction, so Polyglot will accept large chunks of text to translate.
You could, for example, open a web page, select and copy the text from
the website and then paste it into Polyglot and have the whole page
translated.
A new button has been added in Polyglot labeled "File". If you use this
button, you can tell Polyglot to translate a whole text file.
There are some Unicode related problems in Translate Languages in
languages which use special characters that have been fixed in Polyglot.
Here is the help information from Polyglot:
Press Alt-Shift-F7 by default to translate between two languages via the
Microsoft API. Choose the source and result languages from the
listboxes. Enter the source content in the edit box. Press Enter for
the default, Translate button. The result is copied to the clipboard
and spoken. Use the Detect button to guess the language of the content
instead. The best guess is given. At the time of this writing, about 38
languages may be translated and detected. Use the File button to
translate a text file. When this button is activated, a standard file
open dialog will appear to let you choose the file to translate. for
best results the file should be in Unicode, especially if the file
contains special characters. The translated file will be stored in the
same folder with the same name as the source file but with ".plg" append
to the end of the file name. The file path and name will be placed on
the clipboard. The Original button sets the content to the line of text
that had focus before the dialog was invoked. It remembers the
languages and content chosen the previous time. A second hotkey,
Alt-Shift-Windows-F7 by default, will download and refresh the latest
valid language list from Microsoft, so that you can take advantage from
any new languages added by Microsoft. The app is based on Jamal
Mazrui's Translate Languages app and calls a utility, TranLang.exe,
which was also written by him. It may be necessary to initially run the
utility at the command line to authorize it for Internet access with
antivirus software. This global script requires GW Toolkit and Homer
Shared Object.
I appreciate the work Jamal has done in writing tranlang.exe and the
Translate Languages app. Withoug them I would not have been able to
create Polyglot. My thanks also to Chip Orange for giving me a hand with
a little issue I had in creating the package.
I hope some of you will find this app useful. I use it often.
Kind regards
Christo de Klerk
