Pros: If you want to speed up your translation by taking advantage of Google Translate’s suggestions, this tool allows you to do it from within any program you are using to translate: just select the sentence to translate, hit Ctrl+J, and the selected source text is replaced by the Google translation. I tested it from within Workbench (using both the Word and the Tag Editor interfaces), and from within SDLX. It works, and can help speeding up your translation. The tool is cheap, and allows for a generous trial period.

Cons: Apart from the obvious (the quality of the MT provided), the tool sometime only translates parts of the text, if the selection is too long. Also, concerns have been voiced about the use Google will make of the texts you pass through their translation engine, and they also apply if the text is processed by Google through another interface such as this one.

As regards the quality of the MT provided by Google, your mileage may vary, depending on the type of text and language pair. In some fields I find it is good enough as a first rough draft. In others it is still quite useless.

Apache server provides a .htaccess file using which you can use to redirect URLs. For example, if you want to redirect all visitors to http://dallascao.com/cn/ to http://dallascao.com/en/, you can open the .htaccess file at the root, and then input:

RewriteRule ^cn\/?$ en\/

Translating the code in English, it means “Please replace ‘^cn\/?$’ with ‘en/’”. “^cn\/?$” is a regular expression, in which:

“^” matches the beginning of a string.
“$” matches the end.
“\” means “/” following it stands for “/” itself, not part of the grammar.
“?” means there can be one “/” or no “/”

So “^cn\/?$” matches two strings: “cn/” or “cn”. When visitors visit http://dallascao.com/cn/ (end with a slash) or http://dallascao.com/cn (end with no slash), they are redirected to http://dallascao.com/en/

Task two:

If you want to redirect all visitors to the root of http://dallascao.com/ to http://dallascao.com/en/, I can use this:

RewriteRule ^$ en\/

“^$” matches an empty string, meaning the root.

Task three:

Inputting the following code into the .htaccess of http://gt4t.net/, all visitors to http://gt4t.net/anything/ to http://gt4t.net/en/anything/. For example, visitors to http://gt4t.net/downloads/ will be redirected to http://gt4t.net/en/downloads.

RewriteRule ^(.*?)\/?$ \/en\/$1

“^(.*?)\/?$” means anything that either ends with one “/” or no “/”. In the second part, “\/en\/$1″, “$1″ stands for the 1st bracketed element in the previous string “^(.*?)\/?$” (in this case, the only bracketed element.). And it means replacing “ANYTHING” ending with “/” or no “/” with “/en/ANYTHING/”

By the way, if you want your redirection to be hidden, you can add the following option to the beginng .

Options +FollowSymLinks

In the example above, your visitors to http://gt4t.net/downloads is redirected to http://gt4t.net/gt4t_en/downloads/ but http://gt4t.net/downloads is still shown in the address bar.

Finally, here is is the complete .htaccess file:

RewriteEngine on
Options +FollowSymLinks
 
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^gt4t.net$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www.gt4t.net$
RewriteRule ^(.*?)\/?$ \/gt4t_en\/$1 [L]

Confused? Contact me if you have such a need. I will be happy to help you.

Google maps shows it is largely uninhabited. Google gave this land a name North Korea due to the fact that it is to the north of Korea.

Very soon I wanted to start a public wave (topic) myself. I searched google and found nothing and I searched inside GoogleWave and found this (sorry that I don’t know who this article should be attributed to):

How To Find Public Waves

you search group:public@a.gwave.com. To find only English waves search lang:en. Add tags to refine your search: tag:wavedev for example. (Add your friends to this wave so they can see these directions.). See step 4 below for a list of tags you can search. You can remove blogger posts with -with:blog-wave@appspot.com.

You can also search for “with:public” to read all the WAAVVVESS.

If you are just getting started and need help, try searching group:wavehelp@googlegroups.com

How To Make Public Waves

1. add public@a.gwave.com (not googlewave!) to your contacts in the lower left, using the (+) next to “Manage contacts”.

It will say the account doesn’t exist, PRESS the Enter Key to add anyway! (not click the button)

2. Add this public contact to a wave you want to have be made public

3. A Yellow/Beige bar will appear saying “Everyone has access to this wave.” This means the wave is public.

4. None of the above work for some users due to yet another bug. A good workaround is to add easypublic@appspot.com instead.

in Word 2003, click Edit->Selective Paste->plain text.

You can also use the keyboard – ALT+E, L and then select.

I always wonder why Microsoft doesn’t make it easier. Why isn’t there a direct keyboard short cut to such an useful operation? Microsoft doesn’t provide a shortcut, but you can create one yourself:

With Word 2003:

Go to Tools->Macro->Visual Basic Editor->Right click on Normal and then click Insert–>Module. Copy and paste the following code to that Module and save.

Sub PastePlain()
Selection.PasteAndFormat (wdFormatPlainText)
End Sub

Now you have created a small macro named PastePlain. The next step is to create a shortcut to that macro: In Word 2003, Click tools ->customize->commands->Keyboard button. Select Macros in the Categories list, choose PastePlain, click “Press new shortcut” box and press down a key combination like ALT+V.

Next time you you copy some text, you can use the usual CTRL+V to paste rich text, and ALT+V to paste plain text.

However, your shortcut will only work within Word. To paste plain text in all applications, (pasting a table on a webpage to Excel, for example), you can download the new version of GT4T. The pasting plain text and checking Google Dictionary features of GT4T are  free, which means you will never get the payment request notice if you only use them.

To do this, you need to edit the header.php of the English version under the /en/ folder and add the following code before the tag:

<!--set permanent cookie -->
<?php 
setcookie("lang", "en", time()+94608000, "/", ".dallascao.com");
?>

This code writes a variable “lang” on your computer and assigns a value “en”. 94608000 is the expiration time (3 years). “/” and “.dallascao.com” means it works from the root directory of dallascao.com and its subdomains. Inserting this code into header.php means that when you visit any page of the English version, your visit will be remembered.

Likewise, you need to insert the following code into the header.php of the Chinese version.

<!--set permanent cookie -->
<?php 
setcookie("lang", "cn", time()+94608000, "/", ".dallascao.com");
?>

It means when you visit the Chinese version, the variable “lang” will be assigned the value of “cn”.

At last, Create an index.php at the root containing the following code.

<?php $lang=$_COOKIE["lang"];
switch ($lang) {
 
case 'cn':
header('Location:  http://dallascao.com/cn');
break;
 
case 'en':
header('Location:  http://dallascao.com/en');
break;
#Get the default language of the browser if no cookies are found.
default:
	$lang = getDefaultLanguage(); 
	switch ($lang) { 
       case 'zh-cn' : 
               header('Location:  http://dallascao.com/cn'); 
               break; 
       default: 
	          header('Location: http://dallascao.com/en'); 
              break; 
		} 
break;
}
?>
 
 
<?php
 
 
 
#########################################################
# Copyright ? 2008 Darrin Yeager                        #
# http://www.dyeager.org/                               #
# Licensed under BSD license.                           #
#   http://www.dyeager.org/downloads/license-bsd.php    #
#########################################################

function getDefaultLanguage() {
   if (isset($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]))
      return parseDefaultLanguage($_SERVER["HTTP_ACCEPT_LANGUAGE"]);
   else
      return parseDefaultLanguage(NULL);
   }
 
function parseDefaultLanguage($http_accept, $deflang = "en") {
   if(isset($http_accept) && strlen($http_accept) > 1)  {
      # Split possible languages into array
      $x = explode(",",$http_accept);
      foreach ($x as $val) {
         #check for q-value and create associative array. No q-value means 1 by rule
         if(preg_match("/(.*);q=([0-1]{0,1}\.\d{0,4})/i",$val,$matches))
            $lang[$matches[1]] = (float)$matches[2];
         else
            $lang[$val] = 1.0;
      }
 
      #return default language (highest q-value)
      $qval = 0.0;
      foreach ($lang as $key => $value) {
         if ($value > $qval) {
            $qval = (float)$value;
            $deflang = $key;
         }
      }
   }
   return strtolower($deflang);
}
 
 
?>

On FireFox, you need first install Greasemonkey plugin. Then you go to http://wittman.org/projects/friendfeedtranslate/install/ and click on one of the buttons. Then an “Translate X to English (or to any other languages)” button will appear on the right top corner of your friendfeed. Click that button and all the contents on the page you are viewing will be translated into English.”

FriendfeedTranslate is part of a project called Translaterize, which also includes “Translaterize for Facebook.”

http://dallascao.com/en/2009/07/the-context-sensitive-language-versions-link/

by clicking “中文” at the bottom, he is taken to

http://dallascao.com/cn/2009/07/the-context-sensitive-language-versions-link/

So it involves replacing the “/en/” the URL of the current page with “/cn/”.

The following php code gives out wrong results:

<?php $url_old = "http://".$_SERVER ['HTTP_HOST'].$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>
<?php $url_new=str_replace("en","cn",$url_old); ?>   
<a href=<?php echo $url_new; ?>Chinese</a>

Whichever page you are visiting, $url_old always gives the home URL “/en/index.php”. This is because I turned Permalinks on and the URL is rewritten. The URL rewritting takes place after the execution of PHP codes on the server side, and therefore the php string “$url_old” cannot get the actual URL as it is rewritten afterwards. The following java script can get the right current URL as java script runs on the client’s computer:

<script>
var s=window.location.href
r=s.replace (/en/, "cn");
document.write ("<li><a title='English verion of this page' href="+r+">Chinese</a></li>")
</script>

More information:

java replace () method

The language filter can be applied to one feed or as a global parameter. When a user subscribes to a feed, they can choose to show only contents of that feed in languages they know, or they can go to the Option section, and pick the languages they know and click OK to set it as a global preference.

A even cooler stuff is to add an auto translation feature which can translate any language in a page into one language.