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String translation Java (English to Japanese)

 
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Hello, I want to know if there's any API available for string translation in Java. I've googled a bit and found Google Translate API but it is a paid service. Can someone suggest any free open source API for accomplishing the above task? Apertium is open source, but it doesn't have support for Japanese. Thanks.
 
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Sorry I cannot answer this as written. What I can tell you (if you did not already know), is that Java has Internationalization (I18N) built into it. This means that if you have specific strings in things like menus, help and titles, etc., and you already have translations, you can let the user's Locale stipulate which version is used. You would make a property file (more generally a Resource Bundle) for each such target language (US English, UK English, Japan Japanese, Austrian German, etc.).

This means more work for you, but you might get more accurate results, too. For example, a translation service that primitively transliterates one word into "its equivalent" in another language could get the wrong connotation. For example I just translated "Start a conversation" from the Firefox menu, into French. Then I translated that back, and it became "Start a dialog". Usually that's close enough. But it shows you what kind of variation could happen, especially for 'technical' terms.

I wonder at this date and age, that someone has not come up with standardized translations for a wide variety of technical / menu commands. And of course, if you are not doing anything technical, but instead are providing some chat-like interface, this all means nothing

Anyway, I hope it helps.
 
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L Foster wrote:I wonder at this date and age, that someone has not come up with standardized translations for a wide variety of technical / menu commands.



Well, they have. As you know Microsoft has been producing versions of Windows for various languages and cultures for decades now and so naturally they did that. And I found one of their internationalization documents on line earlier this month, too. I don't have the link handy but if anybody is interested I can track it down in my e-mail.

And having received incomprehensible e-mails from Italian mountain-hut operators who thought Google Translate Italian to English was a useful tool, I would hesitate several times before using automated translations in any serious way myself.
 
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Thanks, @Paul for the input.

This would be mainly for future reference, to me, so it is not terribly important, but interesting. However, if you find time to get that document located, I would like to see it.

I did take a quick look and found this:

https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc194756.aspx

It is not exactly what I had mused about. Rather, it gives you some criteria for deciding whether an application is a good candidate for I18N at all. It looks very sensible.
 
Paul Clapham
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The translations I found start here: https://www.microsoft.com/Language/en-US/Default.aspx


Incidentally that page also has a link which says "Translate text and web pages with free online machine translation" so that might be of interest to the OP.
 
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Thanks again, @Paul. There is a licensing step that needs be followed. It looks tolerable, but could require you to get users to click through at least MS' license. Working in Not-for-Profit, I have not pushed things like that onto users in some time. But that seems pretty minor, and not at all unreasonable.

I hope at least some of this is helping Topic Starter @Brendon.
 
Brendon McCullum
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Thank you all for your replies, though I don't think this would help me, unfortunately. The requirement is an English report which is to be given to a Japanese client, so I was looking for some Java API which would do this on the fly. But I don't think it's possible as of now. I have studied the 'locale' class in Java a bit, and would dive deeper, though I highly doubt this would be of any help.
 
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No, professional translation (not internationalization or localization) is not a computer science problem. In most cases, you would need to pay a translation bureau or ask a friend.
 
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