FairVillage - Website Internationalisation Platform
FairVillage WIP (WIP = Website Internationalisation Platform) is an Editorial Desk for the Internationalisation (i18n) of websites; it has been developed inside FairVillage, a sub-project of the FI-Adopt valorization project of the FI-WARE EU Programme.
WIP is an original application of the Translation Proxy concept: an approach to the translation of a web site that operates from outside, by intercepting the request for a web page and serving to the user a page containing translated content. In the translation proxy approach, contents aren't translated at sight, as with GoogleTranslate; rather, fragments of the web page are replaced in real-time with translations that have been prepared offline and revised in context. Obviously, some caching can be applied to improve performance.
Since the background work involved in setting up a proxy site of high quality is critical, WIP aims to support it at a high extent. Learning mechanisms and knowledge reuse are exploited to make the translation and revision tasks more and more productive and to minimize the maintenance-related tasks.
On the server side, WIP integrates the Django web application framework and many Python libraries, such as: NLTK and Scrapy. On the client side, WIP builds on Javascript libraries, such as jQuery, and on the Chrome plugin technology.
WIP can interface web services providing linguistic resources; for example:
- Translation Memories (TM), like MyMemory, and
- Machine Translation (MT) services, like GoogleTranslate
Currently we are experimenting
- Lineardoc, a library by MediaWiki for "translating HTML content using plain text supporting MT engine"; we have converted it from Javascript to Python 3
- eflomal, an advanced algorithm by Robert Östling for word-level aligning of the source and the translated sentences; we are trying to extend it to exploit human supervision.
WIP includes a lot of algorithms and language resources that make it also an ideal tool for research and education in many language-related fields, such as text analysis, web mining, translation and language learning.
The production version of FairVillage WIP runs on Linux-Ubuntu, in a cloud architecture based on the FI-Lab, but we are performing most of the development on Windows.