WWW::Babelfish--3pm

Babelfish(3pm)        User Contributed Perl Documentation       Babelfish(3pm)



NAME
       WWW::Babelfish - Perl extension for translation via Babelfish or Google

SYNOPSIS
         use WWW::Babelfish;
         $obj = new WWW::Babelfish( service => 'Babelfish', agent => 'Mozilla/8.0', proxy => 'myproxy' );
         die( "Babelfish server unavailable\n" ) unless defined($obj);

         $french_text = $obj->translate( 'source' => 'English',
                                         'destination' => 'French',
                                         'text' => 'My hovercraft is full of eels',
                                         'delimiter' => "\n\t",
                                         'ofh' => \*STDOUT );
         die("Could not translate: " . $obj->error) unless defined($french_text);

         @languages = $obj->languages;

DESCRIPTION
       Perl interface to the WWW babelfish translation server.

METHODS
       new Creates a new WWW::Babelfish object.

           Parameters:

            service:        Babelfish, Google or Yahoo; default is Babelfish
            agent:          user agent string
            proxy:          proxy in the form of host:port

       services
           Returns a plain array of the services available (currently
           Babelfish, Google or Yahoo).

       languages
           Returns a plain array of the languages available for translation.

       languagepairs
           Returns a reference to a hash of hashes.  The keys of the outer
           hash reflect all available languages.  The hashes the corresponding
           values reference contain one (key) entry for each destination lan-
           guage that the particular source language can be translated to.
           The values of these inner hashes contain the Babelfish option name
           for the language pair.  You should not modify the returned struc-
           ture unless you really know what you're doing.

           Here's an example of a possible return value:

                   {
                     'Chinese' => {
                                    'English' => 'zh_en'
                                  },
                     'English' => {
                                    'Chinese' => 'en_zh',
                                    'French' => 'en_fr',
                                    'German' => 'en_de',
                                    'Italian' => 'en_it',
                                    'Japanese' => 'en_ja',
                                    'Korean' => 'en_ko',
                                    'Portuguese' => 'en_pt',
                                    'Spanish' => 'en_es'
                                  },
                     'French' => {
                                   'English' => 'fr_en',
                                   'German' => 'fr_de'
                                 },
                     'German' => {
                                   'English' => 'de_en',
                                   'French' => 'de_fr'
                                 },
                     'Italian' => {
                                    'English' => 'it_en'
                                  },
                     'Japanese' => {
                                     'English' => 'ja_en'
                                   },
                     'Korean' => {
                                   'English' => 'ko_en'
                                 },
                     'Portuguese' => {
                                       'English' => 'pt_en'
                                     },
                     'Russian' => {
                                    'English' => 'ru_en'
                                  },
                     'Spanish' => {
                                    'English' => 'es_en'
                                  }
                   };

       translate
           Translates some text using Babelfish.

           Parameters:

            source:      Source language
            destination: Destination language
            text:        If this is a reference, translate interprets it as an
                         open filehandle to read from. Otherwise, it is treated
                         as a string to translate.
            delimiter:   Paragraph delimiter for the text; the default is "\n\n".
                         Note that this is a string, not a regexp.
            ofh:         Output filehandle; if provided, the translation will be
                         written to this filehandle.

           If no ofh parameter is given, translate will return the text; oth-
           erwise it will return 1. On failure it returns undef.

       error
           Returns a (hopefully) meaningful error string.

NOTES
       Babelfish translates 1000 characters at a time. This module tries to
       break the source text into reasonable logical chunks of less than 1000
       characters, feeds them to Babelfish and then reassembles them. Format-
       ting may get lost in the process; also it's doubtful this will work for
       non-Western languages since it tries to key on punctuation. What would
       make this work is if perl had properly localized regexps for sen-
       tence/clause boundaries.

       Support for Google is preliminary and hasn't been extensively tested
       (by me).  Google's translations used to be suspiciously similar to
       Babelfish's, but now some people tell me they're superior.

AUTHOR
       Dan Urist, durist AT frii.com

SEE ALSO
       perl(1).



perl v5.8.8                       2006-12-15                    Babelfish(3pm)