Babelfish(3) User Contributed Perl Documentation Babelfish(3)NAMEWWW::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
language 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
structure 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;
otherwise 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.
Formatting 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
sentence/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@frii.com
SEE ALSOperl(1).
perl v5.14.1 2006-12-16 Babelfish(3)
