Show HN: Longest Translation – Handy utility for multi language designs
longesttranslation.comI've tried "once upon a time there was a king" (the first common words in a lot of fairy tales), which in Romanian should have been translated in five words - "a fost odată un împărat". This tool gives me "cu mult timp în urmă a Trăit-o a fost regele" - double of that amount (and I stop before getting into comments about the translated content itself)!
Come on, you can hardly fault an automated language tool for not translating something idiomatically. Try your comment, and see how it does.
Thanks userulluipeste! It's great to get feedback, seems Yandex API isn't the best, very interested if there's any others people have had a good experience with?
Very nice but your missing the worst offender... Greenlandic :)
Checkout the most translated website in the world to see some of these languages in action http://jw.org - Here is Greenlandic http://www.jw.org/kl/
Wow! Greenlandic looks awesome! Never had the pleasure of supporting greenland yet. Limited by API support currently...
Simple, useful, and well executed.
Thanks for sharing! (or... Mübadiləsi üçün təşəkkür edirik!)
My one thought is that string length in pixels is more important than character count, but you sidestep that issue by showing all the results. You can easily see if one is longer even though it has fewer characters.
Thanks for the feedback DanielStraight! Yep definitely a great idea and something I want to do!
The Chinese for "hello" was sort of correct. It returned 喂 on the bottom of the list, but that's really "hello?" like answering the phone, not 你好 which is actually hello. I was surprised by its selection there.
As a quick explanation. Very simple utility for quickly seeing what is the longest translation (by number of characters) for a specific word/phrase.
Plan to keep this online until I hit my API call limit then will post the source over the weekend!
Enjoy!
You might want to look into actual horizontal space. Visually the Japanese and Chinese translations takes a lot more space than the character count would have you believe.
Can you add an option to select the input language? For example if I submit a Japanese phrase, all the languages give identical results, which is the phrase itself.
Yep, on the feature list, currently it's limited to en -> Other only. Also looking at selecting the target languages so you only see the languages you want.
Well done, this is actually well executed and quite useful to quickly check translations for menus, dialog boxes and so on
What do you use to translate and what is the quality rate on it?
I just played with it for a while and the German translations often were pretty bad ("Essen sie nicht, dass" for "Don't eat that!", when "Essen Sie das nicht!" or "Iss das nicht!" would be correct)
Underneath it is currently using the Yandex API, mainly due to it's generous free tier. Can't speak to the quality myself, but it does the job as a quick tool for simple translations.
wow the front-end makes a separate ajax call for each language - efficient!
You always have the option to not be sarcastic about it, and instead point out where efficiencies could be made. Being nice doesn't cost anything.
It's almost as though efficiency isn't the main priority in a toy app that returns automated translations sorted by length.
anentropic: I liked the effect of when a translation appearing as soon as they return. Not the most efficient decision I know! :D