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How to translate english to hindi

 
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Hi All,

I want to create an application to translate (not convert but translate) document/text/string from English to hindi and vice versa. This application will have to work in offline mode i.e. without net connectivity or using third party APIs.

How can I build this application?
Is there any application exist for translation?

Please guide me.

Regards,
Nitin
 
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I don't know but there must be some pre-programmed external java libraries for language translation. But as you didn't want to you use this you have to write the whole translation algorithm yourself. This isn't hard if you know both the languages your working with, but there is going to be an awful lot of code to handle two whole languages. Nothing that a person does on his own.



Imagine how many lines of code applications like Google Translate is build up on. It especially gets lots when you have to handle expressions as well not just single words.

Just some thoughts.

//Kalle
 
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Kalle Zander wrote:This isn't hard if you know both the languages your working with


I beg to differ. This is an extremely hard problem to automate which has not yet been full solved, and continues to be the subject of much research. Translating the string of words that make up a text word-for-word is fundamentally different from translating the text itself. You're right that one person alone will not be able to implement this, not even to the level of Google Translate (which is often quite a bit off, although the intended meaning can generally be guessed at). So the first question is not so much "how can I approach this?", it's "what quality is still acceptable?" (and, of course, how much time and money is available to spend on this).
 
Kalle Zander
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Ulf Dittmer wrote:

Kalle Zander wrote:This isn't hard if you know both the languages your working with


I beg to differ. This is an extremely hard problem to automate which has not yet been full solved, and continues to be the subject of much research. Translating the string of words that make up a text word-for-word is fundamentally different from translating the text itself. You're right that one person alone will not be able to implement this, not even to the level of Google Translate (which is often quite a bit off, although the intended meaning can generally be guessed at). So the first question is not so much "how can I approach this?", it's "what quality is still acceptable?" (and, of course, how much time and money is available to spend on this).



Yes of course your right, but if we talking about a short translating-program example to show off the concept you don't have to be a language professor to manage it. Although maybe this wasn't what the thread starter was after.

//Kalle
 
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. . . and welcome to JavaqRanch
 
lowercase baba
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Kalle Zander wrote:if we talking about a short translating-program example to show off the concept you don't have to be a language professor to manage it.

//Kalle


I'm not sure what you mean by 'short translating program examples'. Even a few simple words can be very hard to translate...take "It's raining cats and dogs". It would be easy to do a literal word-for-word translation, but in (I'm guessing) most other languages, that expression wouldn't make any sense.
 
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fred rosenberger wrote:Even a few simple words can be very hard to translate...take "It's raining cats and dogs". It would be easy to do a literal word-for-word translation, but in (I'm guessing) most other languages, that expression wouldn't make any sense.


I second to this. The most successful automatic translators today (which are actually not so far ahead of Google, try sometimes to translate between English, French and German using Google Translate) are based on statistical analysis of millions of pages of high-quality human-translated pairs of documents. (By accident, such documents are most easily obtained from the European Union, which routinely translates thousands of documents it produces every year into every EU-official language - about thirty of them in total).

For example, "it's eleven o'clock" is expressed in my language as "it's five to twelve". It took me a few years before I figured this one out (admittedly, I didn't encounter the phrase very often). I may be mistaken, but I hazily remember of reading about a diplomatic delegation that failed to convey the urgency of the situation, because the translator was not familiar with this phrase. Just a side note

"It's raining cats and dogs" sounds quite eerily even now to me. It really isn't how we express such natural phenomena in my mother tongue

Back to the point: if someone really wants to start such a sample project, then functional or declarative languages are probably better suited for this. One of the assignments at the university was a simple translator written in Prolog.
 
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Completely agree with fred and Martin. It is almost AI programming when it comes to translation, unless you want to translate some pre-decided messages only, the way most websites do. Even these websites, who have their pages in different languages, do not perform any sort of translation. Rather, they rely on internationalization support in Java APIs to pick up a particular file (associated with a language/locale) and simply prints messages written in the file. Such an application is very easy to write, but that's not translation at all.

Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) in India have made an attempt towards research and development of translation applications. Given India's diversity in terms of linguistics, it was a well-worth operation to undertake. You can get more info from here.
 
fred rosenberger
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there is a (probably apocryphal) story about some translation software that was being demoed. They would take any English phrase, translate it into some other language, then back to English (possibly with several other language 'hops' along the way). The client asked them to input "Out of site, out of mind", which came back as "Invisible idiot".

note: found this web page, which states my story is at least 25 years old (and the web page has a copyright date of 1999).
 
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Martin Vajsar wrote:For example, "it's eleven o'clock" is expressed in my language as "it's five to twelve". It took me a few years before I figured this one out (admittedly, I didn't encounter the phrase very often). I may be mistaken, but I hazily remember of reading about a diplomatic delegation that failed to convey the urgency of the situation, because the translator was not familiar with this phrase. Just a side note



Are you saying that "it's eleven o'clock" can mean something other than what the actual time is ? I've never heard that. What is the other meaning ?
 
Martin Vashko
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Joanne Neal wrote:Are you saying that "it's eleven o'clock" can mean something other than what the actual time is ? I've never heard that. What is the other meaning ?


Hm, I may be mistaken after all....

I was pretty sure it means that the situation is urgent and cannot wait, or "It is high time".

However, I cannot find anything like it neither on Google, nor at the newspapers I thought I knew the phrase from. Cannot rule out that it was literally translated to English from some other language. I remember it quite vividly thanks to the difference between that phrase and the one in my mother tongue ("five to twelve"). Besides, I don't speak other languages very well, to it had to be English...

Sorry to mislead.
 
Aditya Jha
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Often, I say by mistake 'It's eleven-fifty-five on the clock', when what the correct way is 'five-to-twelve' (at least by the British way of speaking). Although, I feel this is more of a problem of regional influence on language than pure translation.

Just my 2 cents.
 
fred rosenberger
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I think "it's 11 o'clock" could be similar to "The 11th hour" - as in "a time which is nearly too late"
 
Martin Vashko
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fred rosenberger wrote:I think "it's 11 o'clock" could be similar to "The 11th hour" - as in "a time which is nearly too late"


Yes, that was it, thank you. Sorry to all for hijacking this thread into a linguistic corner.
 
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Cross posted
http://www.java-forums.org/advanced-java/36420-how-translate-english-hindi.html
http://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?threadID=2147581 (where it was locked as OT)

edit The java-forums thread has also been locked. This is now the only live(ly) discussion.
 
Ulf Dittmer
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Martin Vajsar wrote:For example, "it's eleven o'clock" is expressed in my language as "it's five to twelve".


That's how it translates in German - "at the 11th hour" would become "it's 5 minutes to 12", meaning "if something isn't done right now, it'll be too late". Think of "12 o'clock" as in "High Noon" :-)
 
Joanne Neal
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Martin Vajsar wrote:

fred rosenberger wrote:I think "it's 11 o'clock" could be similar to "The 11th hour" - as in "a time which is nearly too late"


Yes, that was it, thank you. Sorry to all for hijacking this thread into a linguistic corner.



That makes sense now. I don't think you were hijacking the thread. You seem to have provided a perfect example of how difficult it would be to write translation software.
 
Don't get me started about those stupid light bulbs.
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