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Yahoo! Businesses The Internet

Yahoo IM Translator 184

Posted by CmdrTaco from the world-keeps-getting-smaller dept.
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."
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Yahoo IM Translator More

Yahoo IM Translator

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  • But what about... (Score:5, Funny)

    by maillemaker ( 924053 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:12PM (#14403221)
    But what about Klingon?
    • From the comments in the source code:

      The protruding upper halves of any text translated into Klingon will appear, in the recipient's local dialect, to read "Go stick your head in a pig"

      Okay, not really. But it would be cool.

    • Re:But what about... (Score:2, Interesting)

      by kalleguld ( 624992 )
      hehe, I like how this is marked "Interesting".
    • Yeesh, it's GPL, what are you, lazy?
    • OK, this is off-topic, but the game Guild Wars is very internationalized. They even include a Swedish dialect called "Bork Bork Bork". (really. it's hilarious)

    • Re:But what about... (Score:2, Funny)

      by Anonymous Coward
      Screw Klingon, I want one for n00b -> English.

      Input: "wtf u on!? dat l00t was ph4t, y0!!11!onehundredeleven!! shuda got atleast 100 plat dawg"

      Output: "I say old bean, just what were you thinking? Those items you had were quite nice and you should not have accepted anything less than one hundred pieces of platinum for them, dawg."
    • "But what about Klingon?"

      Don't forget Polish...

  • But can it translate (Score:3, Funny)

    by winkydink ( 650484 ) * <sv.dude@gmail.com> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:13PM (#14403225) Homepage Journal
    "a/s/l"
    "what are you wearing?"

    OK, the latter is probably a slam dunk.

  • site is already slow - here's the text (Score:5, Informative)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:13PM (#14403232)
    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

  • Perfecto! (Score:4, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:14PM (#14403236)
    Por fin puedo escribir en slashdot sin usar un diccionario!

    Uhm... nevermind.
  • ...from the truly foreign languages of SMS, TXT, or 1337? RUOK? TTYL!
  • Can it translate teen to English?
    • Maybe this will help. I found that most of what they say is buried in between filler words and phrases. Just remove the following words or phrases from anything spoken in "teen":
      • like - you have to remove this word a lot. It's used to hold their place in the conversation while they think of something else to say. "Like" is the new "Um". Remove.
      • dog - changes nothing about the tenor of the message. remove.
      • and everything - appended to a sentence to assure the listener that the topic at hand is muc

  • All you need now (Score:4, Funny)

    by ch-chuck ( 9622 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:15PM (#14403250) Homepage
    Just add a text to speech synth, a tiny fish shaped bud and you can ... stick it in your ear.

  • I'am wondering is this the code for the proxy they released?
    Or is it the translation code?

    • Looking at the code 'GoogleTranslator.java' they are just using http://translate.google.com/ [google.com]

      So basicly this is just a proxy which sends a message to google which then translates and the result is returned.
    • ...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,

      • Wow, the human translator must also have and ESP link with the story's author. I don't read much French, but I'm fairly certain that sentence isn't in the French original. So Google's translator's main flaw then is that it doesn't guess what the author didn't include?

        There are flaws in computer translators especially where words have multiple definitions, but overall, if a computer can't translate what you typed correctly, then your probably not using the language right in the first place.

        • Literal translation only works for simple statements like "the monkey is in the tree." Anything beyond that requires human intervention as machine translation simply does not yet have enough nuance. You'd be crazy to rely on it for anything but the most trivial work.
          • The line I was quoting someone didn't make it into my post. "Doctors in Jerusalem say they will keep the 77-year-old leader in an "induced coma" for up to 72 hours." Like I said, I don't know much French, but I'm fairly certain that the paragraph supplied does not have that line. The point I was making is that adding information that isn't in the original is a disinginuous way of claiming that machine translation isn't up to snuff with human translation.
      • Versus the human translation from the English version of the same story:

        This is why machine translation will never completely work (although for technical and other more rigid writing forms it someday will).

        Different cultures place emphasis on different things. A minor example would be where his age is mentioned in the article.

      • I love screwing around with translators. Here's one of my favorites, though using Shakespeare is a bit of a cheat:

        This day is called the feast of Crispian:
        He that outlives this day, and comes safe home,
        Will stand a tip-toe when the day is named,
        And rouse him at the name of Crispian.
        He that shall live this day, and see old age,
        Will yearly on the vigil feast his neighbours,
        And say 'To-morrow is Saint Crispian:'
        Then will he strip his sleeve and show his scars.
        And say 'These wounds I had on Crispin's day.'
        Henr
      • In all fairness, the machine translation is more accurate. The original says nothing about him being 77 years old, an induced coma, or sedation. The human translation says nothing about the ICU of the hospital or his critical state (and I think "fights for his life" really doesn't cut it.)

        Here's a literal translation:
        ISREAL The prime minister Ariel Sharon remains in a critical state after having been the victim of a serious stroke ("brain accident") yesterday. He underwent seven hours of surgery in the inte
  • Keep in mind that the server can get very busy at times.

    I heard one can only stop being busy when one's dead.
  • Cool idea but, wow, that means they'll have a copy of every careless comment you make while chatting. That's one more entity that one has to trust on the Internet.

    UPDATED: I noticed that one can download a local version so this is not an issue. Very nice find and thanks for sharing.
    ---
    My News Satire
  • So does this mean that when you type in "All your base are belong to us"

    It translates roughly as "CATS has taken over all of your bases"?
  • What's Portuguese for A/S/L?

  • Kopete has this... (Score:5, Informative)

    by ElGuapoGolf ( 600734 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:17PM (#14403272) Homepage
    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.
    • So has everybuddy or ayytm (I forget when it first appeared). Uses babelfish to do the translation, works with any protocol supported.

      Of course, I've since moved to gaim so I don't know if current versions still do this, or have improved on it.
      • And even with preview, I screw up "ayttm". Might as well include links too...

        everybuddy WAS at everybuddy.com, but a quick look says it's been squatted.

        AYTTM is at http://ayttm.sourceforge.net/ [sourceforge.net]

        And the feature I miss most from them seems to be coming to gaim in 2.x (all conversations with one person in a single chat window, regardless of protocol)
  • I've seen that Kopete has such an extension to translate your IM chat online, but I havent tried it/needed it so far. Did anyone try it? Are they useful? Can you really get by in a normal conversation?
  • Laat the Babelfish plaisanteries !

  • Surely this IM translator is just as horrid and unreliable as any other mechanical translation mechanism.
  • Or have they fixed that old bug yet? (Seen during tests of EnglishRussian translation about, oh, seven years ago)

  • Application for AIM (Score:2, Informative)

    by DarkIye ( 875062 )
    There's a plugin that does the same thing for AIM, though not for proxies:

    http://tinyurl.com/d4fnc [tinyurl.com]

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

  • It seems strange that this is (to my knowledge) the first time this idea has been implemented. It doesn't seem too hard, with Yahoo! and Google translation services available for hacking. I'd love to see this manifest as a standard feature in other clients like AdiumX or Gaim...any developers out there reading this thread?? ^_^
  • I'd want a translator to understand IM slang/gibberish.
    Am I the only one to sadisticaly force my friends to talk normal english by force feeding them with correct english ? They usually give up the chat-speak after a while.
  • That are large elevation in Entanglement expressions!

  • Skeptical (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    "This HTTP Proxy is a two-way translator which works with your Yahoo! Messenger to translate your typed message into a various languages."

    Hopefully the translation is better than the English in the above sentence.

  • Nice, But... (Score:3, Informative)

    by 99BottlesOfBeerInMyF ( 813746 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:28PM (#14403381)

    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.

    • Forgive my ignorance, but what key combination do you hit to automatically translate stuff in OSX?

      • Forgive my ignorance, but what key combination do you hit to automatically translate stuff in OSX?

        The ones I assigned to it in the "Keyboard and Mouse" system preference pane, after installing language translation services from a third party. Some services are available from here [kavasoft.com]. That one is $10 shareware. I actually evaluated about three different sets of these a few years ago, so there are more available. I think one was free even. If you don't assign keys to them, these functions can be found by goin

  • The vodka is good, but the meat is off!

    Invisible maniac!

  • It uses Google for translation (Score:4, Informative)

    by chriss ( 26574 ) <chriss@memomo.net> on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:30PM (#14403405) Homepage

    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 [logos-os.dfki.de], 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?


    • I'm a french speaking person, french is my mother tongue.
      I'm quite good with english though I am far from perfect.
      I recently started learning (trying to learn, actually) spanish.

      I found someone who has interests in common with mine online and started chatting. I can tell you that google translations are FAR INFERIOR to that provided by the fish.
      Moreover, the fish has the advantage (for me) of being able to translate to/from french in addition to english.

      My only problem with the fish is that it sometim

  • Does it exist for forums? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Charbax ( 678404 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:33PM (#14403428) Homepage
    This is awesome. I would like to have this for a triple-language forum. So users would have to know at least one language of English, French and German to participate. At the top of the page and in the profile settings, there are check boxes the user checks for thwe languages that he understands. Thus is someone doesn't understand German, the plugin would display the auto-translated version in the user's prefered language. Manual translations can be provided by the user to be displayed if available instead of the automatic translation. Please contact me if you have seen this multi-language forum someplace.
    • Please contact me if you have seen this multi-language forum someplace.

      Not with any automatic translation. Although, I frequented alt.lang.conlang a while back. Usually posts would be in English and an alternate language. Most often, posts were made in English+Esperanto, although the second choice alternated occationally between Esperanto and Interlingua.

      I do recall distinctly that there was a chinese person who would enter his text three times, English+Esperanto+Chinese. I actually found it quite helpf

  • Languages (Score:4, Funny)

    by ClamIAm ( 926466 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:34PM (#14403432)
    English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese.

    You forgot Poland.

    • Poland isn't a language.
      • I would've thought that somebody smart enough to know that would understand the joke. Maybe I was wrong...

  • low tech AJAX solution (Score:5, Informative)

    by fak3r ( 917687 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:39PM (#14403467) Homepage
    While you're waiting for this to show up, there's a realtime way of doing this in AJAX now: AJAX translator [parish.ath.cx], 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.

  • Bride (Score:5, Funny)

    by certel ( 849946 ) on Thursday January 05, 2006 @04:41PM (#14403493) Homepage
    Awesome! Now I can speak to my oversea's bride without Babelfish!

  • Google (Score:2, Interesting)

    by XMilkProject ( 935232 )
    I remember there had been some hype about google developing some advanced translation technology based on neural nets learning natural language by comparing UN documents from many languages.

    I wonder if google will soon integrate this sort of technology into their chat client, and hopefully outperform the existing machine translation tech.
    • This project is already using Google's statistical translation system as its backbone. There's no new translation engine intrinsic to this project.
  • d prob i c w dis sys: d msgs typd n2 yahoo msngr rnt typd n englihs, nyway. dey usu lok mch mre lk dis, an evn ppl av a hrd tym readn em.

    Translate that, suckers!
    • d prob i c w dis sys: d msgs typd n2 yahoo msngr rnt typd n englihs, nyway. dey usu lok mch mre lk dis, an evn ppl av a hrd tym readn em.

      You misspellt "neway"
      • d prob i c w dis sys: d msgs typd n2 yahoo msngr rnt typd n englihs, nyway. dey usu lok mch mre lk dis, an evn ppl av a hrd tym readn em.

        You misspellt "neway"

        You misspelt misspelt [reference.com].
        • You misspelt misspelt.

          Damn, you jsut know being a prick never works, because someone out there somewhere can be a better prick back. ;)

          I dictate that I were speaking in Krach42 dialect, which allows for the spelling "misspellt", along with "definately". ;)
          • I dictate that I were speaking in Krach42 dialect, which allows for the spelling "misspellt", along with "definately". ;)

            "Please descibe the effects of the American Revolution in your own words."

            "Grabblet koonkie purtonony, viscolia trae blakknet ontor whazzmardlen." :)
    • Ok,

      The problem I see with this is: the messages typed into Yahoo! Messenger aren't typed in English, anyway. They usually look much more like this, and even people have a hard time reading them.

      Wait, you mean you can't get modded +Smartass yet?
  • Discussions with friends in the strange countries or for with people of other cultures after the coincidence speak, profit from this kind of the technology. Everything does not remove technical will suffers terriblly and straight under untranslated words (as a everyone, which read at all, the Japanese, Korean or even German small article report places of assembly know).

    (This post courtesy of English -> German -> English translation. The first sentence is actually pretty close to what I wrote. The se
  • Can it translate itself into a proper programming language like C?

    Sorry, I couldn't resist. Tes, I'm a Java coder too ;)

  • Why do I see a spawn of Engrish.com [engrish.com] type sites coming about from using this proxy? At least they're not offering Chinese as one of the languages.
  • Now I can be hit on via IM by every perv on the planet in my own badly bruised native tongue. Just what I needed. *Eye Roll*

    How did I ever live with out it?

    2 cents,

    Queen B
  • Interesting,

    Kopete (A KDE IM client) has had this for a while now.... It's quite handy to abuse somewhone in Portugese!!

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