
Show HN: Longest Translation – Handy utility for multi language designs - clloyd
http://www.longesttranslation.com
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userulluipeste
I'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)!

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logicallee
Come on, you can hardly fault an automated language tool for not translating
something idiomatically. Try your comment, and see how it does.

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KMuncie
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](http://jw.org) \- Here is Greenlandic
[http://www.jw.org/kl/](http://www.jw.org/kl/)

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clloyd
Wow! Greenlandic looks awesome! Never had the pleasure of supporting greenland
yet. Limited by API support currently...

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DanielStraight
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.

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clloyd
Thanks for the feedback DanielStraight! Yep definitely a great idea and
something I want to do!

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bx_
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.

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clloyd
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!

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wodenokoto
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.

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Grue3
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.

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clloyd
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.

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motdiem
Well done, this is actually well executed and quite useful to quickly check
translations for menus, dialog boxes and so on

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kpatel79
What do you use to translate and what is the quality rate on it?

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dEnigma
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)

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anentropic
wow the front-end makes a separate ajax call for each language - efficient!

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matthewmacleod
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.

