I've got an idea for a nicely simple web app. At least, it would be very, very simple if I lived in the US. In Belgium, the matters are different: I want people from french, dutch, english, and other backgrounds to be able to use it. And i want to use tags, which may have to be translated in all different languages. Not to mention other issues.

i'm aware that automatic translation is still a bit dodgy, and gives rise to comical situations. Still, for tags it might be OK, since we're speaking about a single word at a time (mostly).

Anyhow, i found out that Google Translate needed a ruby API. Why am I looking into Google Translate ? Because they have access to humungous datasets, so it's a reasonable assumption that their translation algorithm have been trained with mind-bogglingly large test and verification sets, which is a good start.

So I wrote a wee RubyGem google-translate today for interaction with the Google Translate API in Ruby. If you've got github added to your gems sources, you can do:

sudo gem install elisehuard-google_translate
    

Suggestions are welcome.

(Sorry Wouter, I'll look into making it a Debian package later ;-) )