[lac-discuss-en] Status of translation software

[Jacqueline Morris]

Thanks so much Kent for all the hard work! I am sure the system will
be brilliant when you finally get it going. I for one would be glad to
get back to the Google translation engine. This has been a long and
difficult road, and I am sure you'll get loads of emails complaining
about the translation of your message... but when we switch over, I'm
sure all complaints will totally cease!

Jacqueline A. Morris
Technology should be like oxygen: Ubiquitous, Necessary, Invisible and
Free. (after Chris Lehmann )



On Tue, Sep 20, 2011 at 3:00 PM, kent <kent at icann.org> wrote:
> Hello all
>
> As you know, the Google interface we were using with some success a few
> months ago was discontinued.  Google released a commercial version not
> too long ago, and I have been working on incorporating that into the
> translation software.  This has been a bigger deal than I would have
> thought, for several reasons.
>
> The previous version of the software used a general purpose translation
> interface that happened to support Google, but unfortunately that
> general purpose interface did not, last time I looked, work with the new
> commercial API.  So it was necessary to re-code the system to directly
> use the new API.  This was probably a good thing to do on general
> principles, but it wasn't as easy as one would like.  However, I now
> have this working.
>
> However, a further problem emerged in my testing: the new API is a
> commercial product.  They carefully meter how much text you have
> translated, and they are stricter about the amount of text that you can
> translate in a single request.  In particular, the default limit for a
> request is now around 2000 bytes, and a significant part of that is
> consumed in the protocol boilerplate.  Moreover, the transmitted text
> must be encoded in a way that can significantly expand the number of
> bytes sent (for those that care, the interface is a REST interface, the
> text must be URI-escaped, and all the other parameters count in the
> limit - it is 2K for the entire URL).
>
> Previously we just returned an error when the text to be translated was
> too large, but this new limit is so small that it really is necessary to
> handle the error in a more graceful way.  I am implementing this change
> at the moment, and I expect it to be done today.  If things go as
> planned, I will convert the list to use the new code tomorrow.
>
> However, please bear in mind that there have been significant internal
> changes, so there may well be issues.  Please contact me
> (kent at icann.org) with any problems you may find.
>
> Best Regards
> Kent Crispin
>
>
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