babelgnus

babelgnus

[Steinar Bang]

A couple of days ago I saw an announcement for a perl interface to the 
Babelfish
        http://babelfish.altavista.com/

Wouldn't it be cool to have builtin Babelfish support in Gnus that
could translate languages, either automagically or on demand...? :-)

Hm... how about a message compose mode where you could write a message 
in one language and post it in another...?

(Note! I know from experimentation how,... er... interesting the
babelfish translatations actually are, but it would have been _kewl_,
like...:-) )

Re: babelgnus

[David Hedbor]

Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

> A couple of days ago I saw an announcement for a perl interface to the 
> Babelfish
>         http://babelfish.altavista.com/
> 
> Wouldn't it be cool to have builtin Babelfish support in Gnus that
> could translate languages, either automagically or on demand...? :-)
> 
> Hm... how about a message compose mode where you could write a message 
> in one language and post it in another...?
> 
> (Note! I know from experimentation how,... er... interesting the
> babelfish translatations actually are, but it would have been _kewl_,
> like...:-) )

If anyone makes something like this, I would use it for sure. People
tend to write me emails in spanish for example. The thought has
actually crossed my mind. It would probably be rather simple to make
an external program which Gnus can call, and possible to make it
internally in emacs as well.

-- 
[ Below is a random fortune, which is unrelated to the above message. ]
Deliberation, n.:
	The act of examining one's bread to determine which side it is
	buttered on.
		-- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"

Re: babelgnus

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "sb" == Steinar Bang <sb@metis.no> writes:

  sb> Wouldn't it be cool to have builtin Babelfish support in Gnus
  sb> that could translate languages, either automagically or on
  sb> demand...? :-)

babel.el is able to do this. It's not at all specific to Gnus; you say
`M-x babel', it prompts you for a phrase to translate and a pair of
source and destination languages, and displays the (washed) result of
the translation in a *babel* buffer (it's quite a bit like nnweb.el).
There is also `M-x babel-region', which is likely to be more useful.

I just wrote it (I'm in work avoidance mode), so it's hardly been
tested. Download at

   <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/babel.el>

-- 
Eric Marsden
It's elephants all the way down

Re: babelgnus

[Per Abrahamsen]

Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

> I just wrote it (I'm in work avoidance mode), so it's hardly been
> tested. Download at
> 
>    <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/babel.el>

It's cool!  Here is a Gnus interface to it.  

I think it should be added to Gnus with a keybinding and a menu, but
that will have to wait until Lars reappears.  For now, just add it to
your `.gnus', and Type `M-x article-babel RET' in the summary buffer
to translate the current message.

(defun article-babel-prompt ()
  "Prompt for a babel translation."
  (require 'babel)
  (completing-read "Translate from: "
		   babel-translations nil t
		   (car (car babel-translations))
		   babel-history))

(defun article-babel (translation)
  "Translate article according to TRANSLATION using babelfish."
  (interactive (list (article-babel-prompt)))
  (require 'babel)
  (save-excursion
    (set-buffer gnus-article-buffer)
    (when (article-goto-body)
      (let* ((buffer-read-only nil)
	     (start (point))
	     (end (point-max))
	     (msg (buffer-substring start end)))
	(delete-region start end)
	(babel-fetch msg (cdr (assoc translation babel-translations)))
	(save-restriction
	  (narrow-to-region start (point-max))
	  (babel-wash))))))

Re: babelgnus

[Stainless Steel Rat]

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* Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk>  on Fri, 28 May 1999
| It's cool!  Here is a Gnus interface to it.

Dieses ist die größte Sache seit geschnittenem Brot.  Oder Gnus.
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Re: babelgnus

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

Hi,

>>>>> On 28 May 1999 16:29:21 -0400
>>>>> Stainless Steel Rat <ratinox@peorth.gweep.net> said:

 Rat> Dieses ist die größte Sache seit geschnittenem Brot. Oder Gnus.

Weg kühl!

Hmm, I think the next step is to interpret a "Content-Language" header 
[RFC 1766]: look if it is in `gnus-read-languages', if not translate
via babelfish to the first language in `gnus-read-languages'.

Inserting "Content-Language" into sent mail, would be good, too.

	Robbe

-- 
Robert Bihlmeyer	reads: Deutsch, English, MIME, Latin-1, NO SPAM!
<robbe@orcus.priv.at>	<http://stud2.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426626/sig.html>

Re: babelgnus

[Hans de Graaff]

Robert Bihlmeyer <e9426626@stud2.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

> Hmm, I think the next step is to interpret a "Content-Language" header 
> [RFC 1766]: look if it is in `gnus-read-languages', if not translate
> via babelfish to the first language in `gnus-read-languages'.
> 
> Inserting "Content-Language" into sent mail, would be good, too.

Hmm, determining the language used and putting it in a header would
also be useful for the message keyword stuff, as it could then select
the proper exclusion stuff.

Hans

Re: babelgnus

[Robert Bihlmeyer]

Hi,

>>>>> On 01 Jun 1999 18:12:30 +0200
>>>>> Hans de Graaff <graaff@xs4all.nl> said:

 Hans> Hmm, determining the language used and putting it in a header
 Hans> would also be useful for the message keyword stuff, as it could
 Hans> then select the proper exclusion stuff.

word-adaptive-scoring also depends on a list of stopwords. True, you
can put words from all langauges you read in there, but "die" is one
example that is highly significant in English, but not at all in
German.

Perhaps the list of "frequent {English,German,French,Suaheli,...}
words" can be unified. I.e. we'd have

(defvar frequent-words
  '((english "the" "a" "one" "for" "that")
    (german "der" "die" "das" "mit" "eine" "einer")
    (lisp "defun" "defvar" "cond")))	

which is used for language detection (the langage with the most hits
is probably correct), and stopword generation.

	Robbe

-- 
Robert Bihlmeyer	reads: Deutsch, English, MIME, Latin-1, NO SPAM!
<robbe@orcus.priv.at>	<http://stud2.tuwien.ac.at/~e9426626/sig.html>

Re: babelgnus

[Jan Vroonhof]

Robert Bihlmeyer <e9426626@stud2.tuwien.ac.at> writes:

>  Hans> Hmm, determining the language used and putting it in a header
>  Hans> would also be useful for the message keyword stuff, as it could
>  Hans> then select the proper exclusion stuff.

And then automatically detect that flyspell is giving to many "word
mispelled" markings and automatically switch to the appropriate
language!

Jan

-- 
Jan Vroonhof                    http://www.math.ethz.ch/~vroonhof/
Mathematik,                               vroonhof @  math.ethz.ch
HG E16, ETH-Zentrum,                      Tel: +41-1-6325456/25154
Raemistrasse 101, CH-8092 Zuerich.              Fax: +41-1-6321085

Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Per Abrahamsen <abraham@dina.kvl.dk> writes:

> I think it should be added to Gnus with a keybinding and a menu, but
> that will have to wait until Lars reappears.

I've now added it to Gnus.  Shouldn't babel.el be distributed with
Emacs?  Eric, d'you wanna sign it over to the FSF, and then I can ask
RMS whether he wants it in there?  And Steve?  Martin?  Hrvoje?
Include it in XEmacs, perhaps?  It's sehr (sorry, I mean "trés")
useful.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: babelgnus

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "larsi" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

  larsi> I've now added it to Gnus. Shouldn't babel.el be distributed
  larsi> with Emacs? Eric, d'you wanna sign it over to the FSF, and
  larsi> then I can ask RMS whether he wants it in there? And Steve?
  larsi> Martin? Hrvoje? Include it in XEmacs, perhaps? It's sehr
  larsi> (sorry, I mean "trés") useful.

Sicher wolltest du «très» sondern «trés» sagen.

Since writing babel.el I have found out that Systrans (the company
which developed the translation technology used at Babelfish) allow
web access to their motor at www.systransoft.com, without the annoying
cutoff after a few hundred characters at Babelfish. There is also a
competing motor called InterTran at www.tranexp.com, which can
translate between any combination of 25 languages (including Welsh!),
though the results look worse than with Systrans.

So I am planning to rewrite babel.el to allow access to these
alternative servers. Not today though, I have a Master's thesis due
tomorrow :-)

As to eventual bundling with emacs: I think it would be useful to
distribute with XEmacs, which comes with Emacs/w3. I doubt RMS will
want to include it in Emacs, because of the w3 dependency. 

-- 
Eric Marsden
It's elephants all the way down

Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

> So I am planning to rewrite babel.el to allow access to these
> alternative servers.

Great!

> As to eventual bundling with emacs: I think it would be useful to
> distribute with XEmacs, which comes with Emacs/w3. I doubt RMS will
> want to include it in Emacs, because of the w3 dependency. 

That's true.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: babelgnus

[William M. Perry]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

> Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:
> 
> > So I am planning to rewrite babel.el to allow access to these
> > alternative servers.
> 
> Great!
> 
> > As to eventual bundling with emacs: I think it would be useful to
> > distribute with XEmacs, which comes with Emacs/w3. I doubt RMS will
> > want to include it in Emacs, because of the w3 dependency. 
> 
> That's true.

Then integrate W3 with Emacs. :) RMS is waiting for it to get done, I just
do not have time. :(

-bp

Re: babelgnus

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "ecm" == Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

  ecm> So I am planning to rewrite babel.el to allow access to these
  ecm> alternative servers.

which I have now done. I'm afraid it broke Per's Gnus interface, but
using the new function `babel-as-string' it should be easy to fix.

The new version is able to use three backends: Babelfish at Altavista,
Systran directly from their web site, and InterTrans (translate to and
from any of 25 languages!). Go wild.

   <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/babel.el>
  
-- 
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Re: babelgnus

[Toni Drabik]

Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

> The new version is able to use three backends: Babelfish at
> Altavista, Systran directly from their web site, and InterTrans
> (translate to and from any of 25 languages!). Go wild.

Err... Friendly warning: InterTran looks interesting at a first sight,
but its results are *awful*. Or at least they were when I last
checked, about a month ago -- almost every translation between
English, German and Croatian was unusable.

-- 
Warning: This article may be fatal if swallowed.
Toni Drabik <tdrabik@public.srce.hr> * <URL:http://public.srce.hr/~tdrabik/>

Re: babelgnus

[Jaap-Henk Hoepman]

On 15 Jun 1999 17:24:41 +0200 Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:
> >>>>> "ecm" == Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:
> The new version is able to use three backends: Babelfish at Altavista,
> Systran directly from their web site, and InterTrans (translate to and
> from any of 25 languages!). Go wild.

Gaat woest.   :-)

Inderdaad....

InterTrans translations are extremely funny, but completely unusable.

Jaap-Henk

-- 
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Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

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Jan Egil Hagen <janha@ifi.uio.no> writes:

> There should be a variable gnus-babel-languages so that it will be
> possible to do something like:
> 
> (setq gnus-babel-languages
>       '(("^fr" "French -> English" t)
>         ("^de" "German -> English" nil)))
> 
> The third element in each list says whether article-babel should
> *always* translate, or just default to this value if called
> interactively.

That's a good idea.  I've now added a `gnus-treat-translate' variable, 
but I'm wondering a bit about a slightly more general thing, and
that's the controlling-what-groups-a-treatment-function-is-run-in
thing.  It's more obviously an important thing with this function than 
with, say, gnus-treat-display-smileys, but perhaps there should be a
general mechanism.

Should the treatment variables also allow, say, a list of regexp to
match groups where they should be used?  Gee, that seems like a pretty 
simple way to solve that problem.  :-)

Anyway, back to the translation thing -- would it make more sense to
specify what the preferred language one reads in is (say, "en"), and
then have a mechanism that says what language groups are in (say, a
whopping big alist of group regexps to languages (anyone want to write 
that alist?)), and then Bob is your mother's brother?

Like:

(setq gnus-preferred-language "en")
(setq gnus-treat-translate '("^fr" "^de"))

This would then mean: «In the "fr" and "de" hierarchies, translate to
English».  Gnus will know what language to translate from based on
that whopping big alist and possible Content-Language tags in the
messages themselves.

(If the preferred language/original language pair is untranslatable,
then Gnus won't do anything.)

Whadday'allthink?

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: babelgnus

[Karl Kleinpaste]

Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:
> Whadday'allthink?

I think that the babel service will go away entirely if it's made so
ubiquitously accessible in reading interfaces.

If every non-French, Gnus-using reader of fr.* starts translating
every single article to English (or German, Finnish, or Flemish), it
seems to me that we should reasonably expect that the service will
abruptly disappear, having been neither intended nor designed for that
level of use.

Once Gnus is able to do such a thing, one can only wonder how long
before Netscrape and Internet Exploder plug-ins will become available
to do the same thing.  There is after all a heavy feature-copying
mentality in such stuff.  (Recall why Gnus gained smilification.)

Keeping translation as a manual request for a single article should be
the way to go.  Auto-translating whole hierarchies will just hurt us,
on a social level.  Those reading national hierarchies should in
general be capable in the subject language.

Re: babelgnus

[Per Abrahamsen]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> Once Gnus is able to do such a thing, one can only wonder how long
> before Netscrape and Internet Exploder plug-ins will become available
> to do the same thing.  

AOL and Microsoft would not do such a thing without contacting Babel
Fish Corporation first.  There are things you can do being #9 most
popular newsreader with less than 1% of the posted articles, which you
can't do when you are #1 or #2.

> Keeping translation as a manual request for a single article should be
> the way to go. 

I agree with that, though.

Re: babelgnus

[Shaun Lipscombe]

I thought that it was #1.  Certainly is on "Shaun's List of good
Newsreaders"

;)

Shaun

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Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

Karl Kleinpaste <karl@justresearch.com> writes:

> I think that the babel service will go away entirely if it's made so
> ubiquitously accessible in reading interfaces.

Well, babelfish seems to have gone away already.  :-(  The host seems
totally dead at the moment.

Anyway, the "Babelfish tool page" (if I remember correctly) detailed
how to install an automatic translator into Mozilla and MSIE based on
babelfish.  I think it added a plugin that adds a button to the
toolbar that would translate the current page.

I think the impact of Gnus users compared to that would be
negligible. 

> Once Gnus is able to do such a thing, one can only wonder how long
> before Netscrape and Internet Exploder plug-ins will become available
> to do the same thing.

:-)  

> There is after all a heavy feature-copying mentality in such stuff.
> (Recall why Gnus gained smilification.)

Er...  Remind me.  I thought it was because Wes wrote the code.  :-)

> Keeping translation as a manual request for a single article should be
> the way to go.  Auto-translating whole hierarchies will just hurt us,
> on a social level.  Those reading national hierarchies should in
> general be capable in the subject language.

They should, but...  For instance, there are quite a lot of people who
work in Norway (for shorter or longer time) who don't speak
Norwegian.  These get along well verbally if the speak English, but
they can't read the Norwegian newsgroups.  Wouldn't it be neat if they 
could?  (Babelfish doesn't do Norwegian, but, like.)  

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: babelgnus

[Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen]

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Eric Marsden <emarsden@mail.dotcom.fr> writes:

>    <URL:http://www.chez.com/emarsden/downloads/babel.el>

Is babelfish feeling ill at the moment?  When I try to translate
something, I just get back oodles of html and then "En Français:", and
then lots of HTML, but no (French) content.

-- 
(domestic pets only, the antidote for overdose, milk.)
  larsi@gnus.org * Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen

Re: babelgnus

[Eric Marsden]

>>>>> "larsi" == Lars Magne Ingebrigtsen <larsi@gnus.org> writes:

  larsi> Is babelfish feeling ill at the moment? When I try to
  larsi> translate something, I just get back oodles of html and then
  larsi> "En Français:", and then lots of HTML, but no (French)
  larsi> content.

I looked an hour ago and it wasn't working for "x -> English"
translations (returning a blank result). Now it seems to be alive
again. 

The debate about automated (mis)use of this type of web service is
very interesting; it is similar to the issue of filtering http proxies
that some people use to avoid junk ads in web pages. I suspect that
there is a sufficiently large proportion of unsophisticated users who
will view advertising for providers not to waste energy on thinking up
strategies to annoy freeloaders (not that it would be too difficult
for them to generated HTML pages which are impossible to wash
automatically).

It's wonderful that open protocols (and w3) make it so easy to do
something like babel.el.

-- 
Eric Marsden
It's elephants all the way down