Offer to help develop adsotrans...

[waynewalter]

I have a dedicated server I can load the source there. I'm a very experience PHP developer and making rapid progress in learning Chinese. I speak English (first), French, and Spanish all fluently. So I really love your open source project to tackle Chinese.

I love adsotrans.com but it's missing quite a few common words. I translated the script for the movie To Live yesterday. It had "bed" instead of shop. It had other gibberish for single

syllable words which were really compound words.

I added a few that I found. But I want LOTS of people to participate to make it better. Don't you?

I see 2 MAJOR improvements needed to accelerate the progress.

1. The English translations need annotation that make it EXTREMELY simple to suggest a better translation by just clicking and then modifying the machine translation with a better translation.

2. The system needs to save all these suggestions with the original Chinese, the machine generated English, the suggested translation, and a couple sentences as context.

3. Editors need to be able to list all the suggestions by date and some brief differences between the machine and suggested translation.

4. They need a page to review them and copy and past charactes to add or change a word in the dictionary. That takes them to your current page for editing or adding words and parts of speech.

5. Of course, if a RULE change is needed instead of just a word, then there should be an option to click to submit a rule change suggestion to you. That can be just an email, if you like but it should also have the original chars, context, and suggestion. The editor can also add a paragraph explaining the reason a rule change is needed.

WHY do we need this? I spotted a dozen suggestions for improvements while studying a movie script between English subtitles, Chinese subtitles, the adso translation, and my dictionary. The move is "To Live" made in 1994.

There was far too much gibberish and it takes way too long to copy and paste the characters to edit them.

If you make that easy, (like Google), then it will grow much faster.

May I help? I can make the English annotation, the table for suggestions,

list of suggestions for Editors, and a page to actually review and mark them

completed.

Wayne

[Prodigal Son]

Great that people are willing to help. I'm a web and print designer also willing to contribute if it's needed. Send me a PM.

[trevelyan]

Hey Wayne,

1. The English translations need annotation that make it EXTREMELY simple to suggest a better translation by just clicking and then modifying the machine translation with a better translation.

2. The system needs to save all these suggestions with the original Chinese, the machine generated English, the suggested translation, and a couple sentences as context.

3. Editors need to be able to list all the suggestions by date and some brief differences between the machine and suggested translation.

4. They need a page to review them and copy and past charactes to add or change a word in the dictionary. That takes them to your current page for editing or adding words and parts of speech.

5. Of course, if a RULE change is needed instead of just a word, then there should be an option to click to submit a rule change suggestion to you. That can be just an email, if you like but it should also have the original chars, context, and suggestion. The editor can also add a paragraph explaining the reason a rule change is needed.

There's definitely a barrier of immediacy that inhibits people from making edits, and I'd love to eliminate that. I think your suggestions are all good, and think one big weakness is the lack of an offline GUI, as well as the necessity of compiling from source to get a working local copy of the software.

I'm working on something that I hope will help address this problem, and also make it easier for people to develop Adso-related stuff. This is a downloadable Windows version of the software. I'm expecting to have a package ready in a week or two: it will give people the ability to run Adso from their local computers, and work just like the website. Just finished downloading the Microsoft SDK last night and the database-connecting software seems to compile happily. It will take me another week to port the rest of the C++ code and get a usable release out the door.

I'm hoping that at that point, interface development will be completely separate from backend application development as far as users are concerned. I'm also considering a rewrite of the backend (first time in two years) as well since there are a lot of places I'd make improvements to it, especially regarding the ways in which rules are passed to the engine (there are at least three different ways of doing it currently - hardcoded in the source, contained in external but included grammar files, or through the CODE field of the database). The more modular and distributable the software/GUI is the easier it should be for people to make fixes and database edits, which should help push the project forward.

I'll write more as things happen, but there should be a pretty major announcement in the next week or two.

[trevelyan]

Wayne,

You're also welcome to play with the source on your own server, etc. I think that this new Windows distribution will be much more usable for most people, so will be concentrating my own time on it. I'd love to get you involved when it's ready.

thx,

--dave

[waynewalter]

Your plan is much better. Especially because it will ease up on the CPU of your server and hopefully allow users to process more than 200 characters at a time.

Please, which SDK do you use? I'd like to go ahead and download and install it.

Can you provide a link?

Thanks.

Wayne

[trevelyan]

This is the version of the Windows SDK I've used to compile the software. There are other sites with a single download, but they caused problems for me because I'm in China and the network kept timing out. This works with the free Microsoft C++ Express Edition compiler.

http://www.microsoft.com/msdownload/platformsdk/sdkupdate/psdk-full.htm

The first desktop release will be a port of the existing server code released under a modified version of XAMPP. I compiled the software last night and it seems to work. It will take another week or so to get everything in order and ready for a public release.

The first release will basically put all server scripts for using/editing Adso directly onto the desktop. People will be able to add/edit the local materials just like editing any other HTML/PHP/PERL based website. I think some of the more important development work (usability, etc.) will probably be HTML/design work and shouldn't require programming experience in C++. I'm going to be redesigning the software backend once the project is launched, so collaborative C++ work will probably take slightly longer to get rolling.

[stephanhodges]

because I'm in China and the network kept timing out

I had the same problem, or worse, from Harbin until I switched to using "Free Download Manager". The program is really amazing. I normally get around 150kb download speeds from the same sites that would give me around 8-10kb. I'm really amazed, because for years, all the download managers I had tried were just "gimicks". However, for what it's worth, in China this one really works well for everyone I've shown it to.

www.freedownloadmanager.org