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WinXLator — the free machine-translation app — was released 1½ years ago but withdrawn later.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?
More info:
A book teaching Finnish for school children tells on page 11: “It is important to know the infinitive, if you need to look up the word in a dictionary. You can get help in this at verbix.com that recognizes the conjugated verb form and returns the infinitive”.
