Thursday, April 23, 2009

Words statistics

I've got one more feature for you. The words link now directs to a statistics of the most common words. The language depends on the URL-based language selection. That is: http://nl.open-tran.eu/words.html shows the most popular words for Dutch and http://af.open-tran.eu/words.html shows the most popular words for Afrikaans. You can also set 2 languages in order to have the links directing you to the appropriate comparison pages. For example: http://en.pt_br.open-tran.eu/words.html will show you the most popular English words with the links to their comparisons in Portuguese. If you have any questions regarding this feature, just let me know.

Specific phrases

Here it comes - the next most requested feature has been implemented. Now, you can require that the original phrase looks exactly (or almost exactly) like you specify. In a discussion with Leandro Regueiro, Alexander Dupuy suggested a way to implement this feature in a very nice, effective way. And so now, if you enclose your phrase (or its part) in double-quotes, open-tran will only show the results that contain that phrase. Substring screenshot open-tran.eu As you can see in the screenshot, I requested the phrase "_save as". The server interpreted the quotes as a request to return only those results, where the original phrase included this phrase literally. So now you can go ahead and try it yourself: http://en.pt_br.open-tran.eu/suggest/"_save as".

This is not the end of news. Did you know that:
  • Virtaal supports Open-Tran as its Memory Translation?
  • Open-Tran website has been translated into twenty languages in 5 alphabets?

Wednesday, April 15, 2009

Periodic Updates

I'd like to announce a long-awaited feature - periodic updates of the database. Me and Leonardo, have been working on this feature for more than 2 months and yesterday, the service has successfully updated itself automatically for the first time. In order to circumvent the limitations of the open-tran.eu server, we have split the importing process and distributed it between 2 servers. We are running the update twice a week, but not every execution succeeds.

There are still couple of details to be worked out: the statistics of words, phrases and projects are not updated yet and the switch still needs to be performed manually.