General presentation
Welcome to this on-line translation website which uses the Apertium
machine translation free software.
Since several years there is an
official translation website that uses Apertium
but it allows only the texts translation of between the two languages
of a validated pair.
In addition, if a validated language pair is modified by an Apertium
developer, these modifications may only become visible on the official
website after a new validation, that can take long.
On the contrary, this website allows :
- The texts translations to another language (direct translation
or through an intermediate language).
- The web pages translations (direct translation or through an
intermediate language).
- The analysis of a surface form, which is a word as it can be
found in a text.
This analysis can provide several possibilities for the input
word.
- The lemma translation, (name or adjective in singular, verb in
infinitive ...) to another language.
For the analysis of a surface forms and the lemma translations, any
language pair of the Apertium project can be used.
For the texts and web pages translations, available language pairs
are those who have reached at least the "Nursery" quality level.
When a language pair of the Apertium project is modified, this
modification (good or bad) will become available on this website
during the next 24 H.
The access to the different translation possibilities can be done
from the menu on the left of this page.
For the texts and web pages translations, two working modes are
proposed for the languages selection :
- Choice in pull-down menus of the source language, the target
language and if needed an intermediate language.
- Manual input of one or two translation direction.
This second way, less intuitive, allows when a language pair has
variants, to choose with more precision how the translation must
be done.
Preferences
The computer screens can have very different size and width/high
ratio and the web browser does not indicate automatically to the
server the size of their display zone.
It is possible to record preferences adapted to your screen for
the texts translation page.
As there are a lot of available languages pairs on this website, it
is possible to limit his choice to a list of preferred languages.
A minimum quality level for the languages pairs can also be chosen
for the texts and web pages translations.
Other choices (direct translation only or not, take-off or keep
some characters which indicates translation problems), are easy
to update (checkbox) but can also be recorded as preferences.
Display preferences
Translation preferences
Cookies
The page for translating texts uses a lot of cookies for working.
This page is divided in two parts :
- The zone for languages selection or translation directions,
- The zone to input the source text and to display the translation.
The website uses of the frames for separate processing and display of
each of these 2 zones.
This technical choice allowed to write in a much more simple way (in
PHP and HTML) this translation page.
Using frames also allows to reduce the data transfers during an action
on the languages selection zone done without having erased the old
content of the zone for source and translated text.
Cookies allow to communicate to the input and translated text zone,
the choices done in the zone for languages selection or translation
directions.
The user preferences for the visual appearance of the texts translation
and for the choice of the proposed languages are also recorded in
cookies.
For the same reason, the web translation page is separated in 3 parts,
including one for the URL of the page to be translated. It uses frames
and cookies.
Details in this page
Get method parameters
Instead of recording preferences for display and translation, or in
addition to this possibility, it is possible to put parameters in the
url of the web page called for a translation.
Details in this page
Download of a local version of the website
If Apertium is already installed on your computer with some language
pairs, you can add :
- a web server (like Apache) and a PHP interpreter,
- this website in local version
to get a machine translation web interface that will work even
without an Internet connection.
Details in this page
Contact
You will find in this page how
contact the author of the website and how you get more information
about Apertium.