Hi all. I have used google translator. And it has horrible grammatical problems. I am looking for some library, or something that is more versatile then that. Does anyone know anything about it? I once heard that pear has a translator package. Does anyone know how efficient it is?
Regards, Krishna Kant Sharma.
You will not find any package that can automatically translate a text gramatically correct. Computers simply can't understand text well enough to translate it.
The main problem with automatic translation is understanding the text that is translated, the actual translation part is trivial in comparison and could be done by a computer.
Take for example a simple sentence like "When the going gets tough, the tough gets going.". It has ambigous words, implicit references and cultural undertones, which is very hard to write an algorithm for deciphering.
I once read about a project of developing an independent, unambigous intermediate translation language, which sounded promising. You could translate your text (partly manually) to this intermediate language, which then could be automatically translated into any language. I haven't heard anything more about it, though...
It's unlikely you'll find a much better solution. There are two primary methods to machine translation - rule based and statistical. Rule based translation has the problem that a great deal of text involves idiomatic expressions, grammar, or vocabulary that are outside the set of rules. Statistical methods can sometimes provide better solutions if there is a large dataset (and large data sets are Google's business), but also has trouble with idiomatic expressions and differences in word order between languages. For more information, check the Wikipedia Article on Machine Translation, and more specifically the articles on Inter-Lingual and Statistical Machine Translation methods.