NAME

WWW::Translate::Apertium - Open source machine translation

VERSION

Version 0.10 April 11, 2009

SYNOPSIS

    use WWW::Translate::Apertium;
    
    my $engine = WWW::Translate::Apertium->new();
    
    my $translated_string = $engine->translate($string);
    
    # default language pair is Catalan -> Spanish
    # change to Spanish -> Galician:
    $engine->from_into('es-gl');
    
    # check current language pair:
    my $current_langpair = $engine->from_into();
    
    # get available language pairs:
    my %pairs = $engine->get_pairs();
    
    # default output format is 'plain_text'
    # change to 'marked_text':
    $engine->output_format('marked_text');
    
    # check current output format:
    my $current_format = $engine->output_format();
    
    # configure a new Apertium object to store unknown words:
    my $engine = WWW::Translate::Apertium->new(
                                                output => 'marked_text',
                                                store_unknown => 1,
                                              );
    
    # get unknown words for source language = Aranese
    my $es_unknown_href = $engine->get_unknown('oc_aran');

DESCRIPTION

Apertium is an open source shallow-transfer machine translation engine designed to translate between related languages (and less related languages). It is being developed by the Department of Software and Computing Systems at the University of Alicante. The linguistic data is being developed by research teams from the University of Alicante, the University of Vigo and the Pompeu Fabra University. For more details, see http://www.apertium.org/.

WWW::Translate::Apertium provides an object oriented interface to the Apertium online machine translation web service, based on Apertium 3.0.

Currently, Apertium supports the following language pairs:

- Bidirectional

• Aranese < > Catalan
• Catalan < > English
• Catalan < > French
• Catalan < > Occitan
• Catalan < > Portuguese
• Catalan < > Spanish
• French < > Spanish
• English < > Galician
• English < > Spanish
• Galician < > Portuguese
• Galician < > Spanish
• Occitan < > Spanish
• Portuguese < > Spanish

- Single Direction

• Basque > Spanish
• Catalan > Esperanto
• English > Esperanto
• Romanian > Spanish
• Spanish > Brazilian Portuguese
• Spanish > Esperanto
• Welsh > English

NOTE: The underlying translation retrieval method changed in version 0.06. The current module is based on the Apertium web service, which serves the translations faster than the previous web scraping approach.

Summary of changes since version 0.05 that may have an impact on legacy code:

- This module expects UTF-8 text and returns UTF-8 text. You can also send text encoded in Latin-1, but the support for Latin-1 will be phased out soon.

- Some language codes have changed: The code for Brazilian Portuguese is now pt_BR and the code for Aranese is oc_aran (used to be oc, which is now the language code for Occitan).

CONSTRUCTOR

new()

Creates and returns a new WWW::Translate::Apertium object.

    my $engine = WWW::Translate::Apertium->new();

WWW::Translate::Apertium recognizes the following parameters:

• lang_pair

  You can find below the valid values of this parameter, classified by source language:

  Aranese into:

  • Catalan -- oc_aran-ca

  Basque into:

  • Spanish -- eu-es

  Catalan into:

  • Aranese -- ca-oc_aran
  • English -- ca-en
  • Esperanto -- ca-eo
  • French -- ca-fr
  • Occitan -- ca-oc
  • Spanish -- ca-es

  French into:

  • Catalan -- fr-ca
  • Spanish -- fr-es

  English into:

  • Catalan -- en-ca
  • Esperanto -- en-eo
  • Galician -- en-gl
  • Spanish -- en-es

  Galician into:

  • English -- gl-en
  • Spanish -- gl-es

  Occitan into:

  • Catalan -- oc-ca
  • Spanish -- oc-es

  Portuguese into:

  • Catalan -- pt-ca
  • Galician -- pt-gl
  • Spanish -- pt-es

  Romanian into:

  • Spanish -- ro-es

  Spanish into:

  • Brazilian Portuguese -- es-pt_BR
  • Catalan -- es-ca
  • English -- es-en
  • Esperanto -- es-eo
  • French -- es-fr
  • Galician -- es-gl
  • Portuguese -- es-pt

  Welsh into:

  • English -- cy-en

  These language pairs are stable versions. Other language pairs are currently under development.

• output

  The valid values of this parameter are:

  • plain_text

    Returns the translation as plain text (default value).

  • marked_text

    Returns the translation with the unknown words marked with an asterisk.

    Warning: This feature is always on in the current version of the Catalan < > French language pair due to a bug in the stable package for these languages. It will be fixed in the next release.

• store_unknown

  Off by default. If set to a true value, it configures the engine object to store in a hash the unknown words and their frequencies during the session. You will be able to access this hash later through the get_unknown method. If you change the engine language pair in the same session, it will also create a separate word list for the new source language.

  IMPORTANT: If you activate this setting, then you must also set the output parameter to marked_text. Otherwise, the get_unknown method will return an empty hash.

The default parameter values can be overridden when creating a new Apertium engine object:

    my %options = (
                    lang_pair => 'es-ca',
                    output => 'marked_text',
                    store_unknown => 1,
                  );

    my $engine = WWW::Translate::Apertium->new(%options);

METHODS

$engine->translate($string)

Returns the translation of $string generated by Apertium, encoded as UTF-8. In case the server is down, the translate method will show a warning and return undef.

The input $string must be an UTF-8 encoded string (for this task you can use the Encode module or the PerlIO layer, if you are reading the text from a file).

If you are going to translate a string literal included in the code and then display the result in the output window of the code editor, then you should add the following statement to your code in order to avoid a "Wide character in print" warning:

    binmode(STDOUT, ':utf8');

$engine->from_into($lang_pair)

Changes the engine language pair to $lang_pair. When called with no argument, it returns the value of the current engine language pair.

$engine->get_pairs()

Returns a hash containing the available language pairs. The hash keys are the language codes, and the values are the corresponding language names.

$engine->output_format($format)

Changes the engine output format to $format. When called with no argument, it returns the value of the current engine output format.

$engine->get_unknown($lang_code)

If the engine was configured to store unknown words, it returns a reference to a hash containing the unknown words (keys) detected during the current machine translation session for the specified source language, along with their frequencies (values).

The valid values of $lang_code for the source language are (in alphabetical order):

• ca -- Catalan
• cy -- Welsh
• en -- English
• es -- Spanish
• eu -- Basque
• fr -- French
• gl -- Galician
• oc -- Occitan
• oc_aran -- Aranese
• pt -- Portuguese
• ro -- Romanian

DEPENDENCIES

LWP::UserAgent

URI::Escape

HTML::Entities

SEE ALSO

WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM

REFERENCES

Apertium project website:

http://www.apertium.org/

If you want to get the real thing, you can download the Apertium code and build it on your local machine. You will find detailed setup instructions in the Apertium wiki:

http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Installation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Many thanks to Mikel Forcada Zubizarreta, coordinator of the Transducens research team of the Department of Software and Computing Systems at the University of Alicante, who kindly answered my questions during the development of this module, and to Xavier Noria and João Albuquerque for useful suggestions. The author is also grateful to Francis Tyers, a member of the Apertium team, who provided essential feedback for the latest versions of this module.

AUTHOR

Enrique Nell, <perl_nell@telefonica.net>

COPYRIGHT AND LICENSE

Copyright (C) 2007-2009 by Enrique Nell, all rights reserved.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.