New Layout: Consistency Matters

I've just uploaded the prototype of the new layout to the server. You can see it by visiting the following URL: http://open-tran.eu/front.shtml.

I'd like this page to become the new front page of open-tran.eu. It is based on this set of ideas presented in the Google Redux. You may call it a shameless plagiarism, but (as far as I know) it has never been realized. I haven't asked the author yet, but I hope that he will not object.

I had the following objectives while implementing the page:

1. Due to the new compare functionality, the page needs to have an unlimited width, such that it might be scrolled horizontally without breaking the layout.
2. The new front page has to be very simple - just the search box - like... you know... Google, or something.
3. The contents of the current front pages will be moved to "help" (but I haven't done that, yet).
4. And finally... I like blue :)

I need your help again. I had to introduce some new phrases and am not 100% sure if I translated them well, so I'd like you to verify if they are correct. Obviously, I hope for more feedback and suggestions.

Known Issues
I'm not an HTML guru - it took me a lot of time to learn it well enough to bring the page to the current state. Any help will be appreciated. Furthermore, I might have done some fundamental mistakes. If you have better ideas on how to improve the site, just let me know.

1. You cannot select the mode yet. The search box doesn't work either. I am working on the form and the accompanying JavaScript.
2. For some reason, the search box border has a proper padding in Opera and IE, but not in Firefox.. I've got no idea, why.
3. Internet Explorer doesn't render the blue box at the top and has problems with transparent backgrounds, so the language choice looks stupid.
4. In some setups, the list of language choices renders incorrectly - the longest line (Biełaruskaja) breaks.
5. I was not able to position all the elements exactly where I wanted. The arrow (↔) is not vertically aligned, the drop down lists are not in the right positions, the submit button should probably be lower.
6. The logo is terrible, there is no real favicon.

I will be mailing those, who translated the page, but I know that some of them read this blog, so beware ;) If you have other questions or ideas, post a comment or send an e-mail to the mailing list.

Articles in various languages

I need your advice again. In an effort to further reduce the database and provide more accurate results I am trying to exclude various types of "words" (lexemes or tokens to be precise). First, I removed all format specifiers, like %s. Next, I decided to reduce the number of words that don't carry any meaning. An obvious example from English language is the article "the". Looking up "the" in open-tran won't display any results, because the engine considers this phrase empty (no words). However, I speak only English and German. Together with my girlfriend and Wikipedia we prepared the following list of articles in several European languages:

Code	Language	List of ignored lexemes
de	German	das, dem, den, der, deren, des, dessen, die, ein, eine, einem, einen
en	English	a, an, the
es	Spanish	el, la, las, los, una, uno, unas, unos
fr	French	la, le, les, un, une
it	Italian	i, il, lo, gli, la, le, un, uno, una
pl	Polish	by
pt	Portuguese	o, os, a, as, um, uns, uma, umas

I am planning to add Dutch articles (de, een, het) in the future, too. As you can see, my table covers only 7 languages and open-tran supports more than 90. So I hope that maybe you could help me assembling similar lists for the remaining languages.

I am aware that suffixes may be used as articles in some languages (e.g. Romanian) and if you have any idea on how to tackle this issue without integration of expensive, language-specific dictionaries, then let me know.

If you have other ideas on how to improve the accuracy and/or limit the number of records stored in the database - I will appreciate your feedback. Leave a comment here, or send an e-mail to open-tran@groups.google.com. Thanks!