What is the best way to approach writing a program in Python to translate English words and/or phrases into other languages?
+1
A:
This is an incredibly difficult problem -- language is very very very complicated. Think about all the things you'd have to do -- parse the phrase, work out what the words mean, translate them. That's probably not idiomatic so you'll need special cases for different syntaxes. Many, many special cases. You'll need to work out the syntax of the foreign language if it differs from English -- "the big green ball" goes to "the ball big green" in Spanish, for instance.
Don't reinvent the wheel. Google provide an API to their translation service, which has undoubtedly had many many clever people thinking really quite hard about it.
katrielalex
2010-10-05 21:33:17
A:
the simplest way to do this is to make a dictionary that matches one language's words to another language's words. However, this is extremely silly and would not take into account grammar at all and it would literally take a very long time to create a translator, especially if you plan to use it for multiple languages. If grammar is not important to you (for example, if you were creating your own language for a game or story that doesn't have grammar different from english) than you could get away with using dictionaries and simply having a function look for a requested match in the dictionary
Blazer
2010-10-06 01:45:00