Machine-translation made easy

For those that like machine-translation, the past years have been really exciting. Thanks to the Google’s machine translation API, there was an increasing number of fancy machine-translation gadgets that brought machine-translation to the user’s desktop in a very comfortable way.

Unfortunately Google no more offers theire machine-translation service for free for programmers. So  we can say goodbye to all the nice and free machine-translation gadgets that we used.

As of today I don’t know any free machine-translation gadget that I could install on my desktop.

Perhaps I should revive the WinXLator project. WinXLator was a machine-translation gadget that was very simple to use. This gadget was based on Apertium machine-translation technology. The biggest benefit of WinXLator over Google translator was that it didn’t require Internet connection to work; all the files needed were installed on the PC.

WinXLator — the free machine-translation app — was released 1½ years ago but withdrawn later. WinXLator couldn’t compete with the Google-based machine-translation gadgets. The bottle-neck was the limited number of supported language-pairs.

But perhaps we should give WinXLator a second try. And also give users a free machine-translation gadget?

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