Yahoo IM Translator

zivkov writes "AvMedia has developed a translating proxy for Yahoo! Messenger. This HTTP Proxy is a two-way translator which works with your Yahoo! Messenger to translate your typed message into a various languages. It supports English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese. The proxy can be used as a personal translator, or as a centralized server, handling multiple Yahoo! IM sessions. The Java source code is available under GPL."

Comments

site is already slow - here's the text

[Anonymous Coward]

This Yahoo Translating HTTP Proxy (YTP) is a two-way translator which works with your Yahoo! Messenger to translate your typed message into a various languages. Your friend will receive translated message, and she can type back in the translated language. For example, if you type to her in English, she can receive the message in French. She can then type back in French and you will get the message in English. The following languages are supported:

* English -> German, Spanish, French, Italian, Portuguese
* German -> English, French
* Spanish -> English
* French -> English, German
* Italian -> English
* Portuguese -> English

This is an Open Source project. The source code is available for download.

If you like to try it first without downloading, we have a live Translating Proxy running on our server. Set your Y! Messenger HTTP proxy Server Name to avmedia.org, and Server Port to 8084. For more detailed instructions see here. Keep in mind that the server can get very busy at times.

See also our SourceForge and FreshMeat projects.

Hope you find it useful.

Ivo Zivkov.

451

Kopete has this...

[ElGuapoGolf]

Just an FYI for those of us in linuxland... Kopete has (and has had) this ability for some time. The translation plugin will work with any protocol that Kopete supports.

Application for AIM

[DarkIye]

There's a plugin that does the same thing for AIM, though not for proxies:

http://tinyurl.com/d4fnc

Are there other such things for MSN, Gaim, mIRC (and other IRC applications)?

Nice, But...

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

Well, that is cool, but I haven't had a problem translating all my chat discussions. I just use some of the translation services available for all text on OS X. It would be nice if my chat client would support automatic translation to and from a given language, for specific person though. I do have to select the text and hit a key-combo. I really hope Linux and Windows catch up and move things like translation and spell/grammar checking to system wide services, rather than re-implementing them in each individual application. When using text or images on Windows, it always feels like I've stepped back to an earlier, more primitive, era of computing.

Translations by Google.

[C10H14N2]

...so unless Google releases it, that would be a big "no."

That said, the Google translator is pretty literal and, ergo, practically useless.

For example, the following text is from the French version of BBC news:

ISRAEL Le premier ministre Ariel Sharon est toujours dans un état critique après avoir été victime d'un grave accident cérébral hier. Il a subit sept heures d'intervention chirurgicale dans l'unité de soins intensifs d'un hôpital de Jérusalem.

Which, sure, you can "get" it with the Google translation to English, but good grief:

ISRAEL the Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is always in a state criticizes after having been victim of a serious cerebral accident yesterday. It has undergoes seven hours of surgical operation in the unit of intensive care of a hospital of Jerusalem.

Versus the human translation from the English version of the same story:

Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon is to be kept heavily sedated as he fights for his life after suffering a major stroke on Wednesday. Doctors in Jerusalem say they will keep the 77-year-old leader in an "induced coma" for up to 72 hours. Earlier, he underwent seven hours of surgery to stop bleeding in his brain.

It uses Google for translation

[chriss]

First I was exited to see an open source translation project, especially in combination with an instant messenger. The I realized that they simply send the messages to Google for translation. So no access to a translation engine and the quality of Googles translations.

There seems to be openLogos, a commercial translation system that has recently become available as open source based on Linux and PostgreSQL. Guess I'll have to give that one a try, it looked rather complicated. Has anybody any experience with openLogos or similar (freely available) systems?

low tech AJAX solution

[fak3r]

While you're waiting for this to show up, there's a realtime way of doing this in AJAX now: AJAX translator, and I could see this making it's way in a website, or forum to provide the same 'on the fly' translation of text. With all that's been done with the internet, it's still pretty segmented in terms of languages; this would open up that knot.