I have a service that allows user's (admins) to change the terminology the site uses. My designer wants me to use the format "A Group". The problem is, for some terminology, it should be "An" not "A".
Is there any way to reliably detect which to use? What about localization?
I can brute force it and get 90% of the way by checking the first letter for consonant vs vowel. That won't work for all words though. And that doesn't cover any language except English.
In my opinion you've got only 2 ways:
1- You need to check the first letter and process all the sentence by checking its letters to see if there is any non-English letters.
2- Provide a dictionary of English nouns then you can easily check your word to find if it needs an "a" or "an".
Although the "a versus an" issue is very specific, what you're describing here is a natural language processing issue. Essentially you are being asked to write code that generates a grammatically correct piece of text.
I think you should try to to explain the implications to the designer, especially if you end up localizing in other languages. Your time is probably better spent working on your app's business logic than on language processing.
Related
I have a slightly unusual profanity-related question.
Now we're used to dealing with profanity-filtering of user-generated content — any method is imperfect, but products like CleanSpeak and WebPurify do a good-enough job.
The problem we have at the moment, though, is that we've been building an engine to run promotional-code–based competitions, that will be used internationally. We could do with checking that none of these codes is profane in Latin American Spanish or Malay (at least in the first instance), to make sure we don't send out a code that's equivalent to FUCK23 or PEN15 or something.
We've tried Googling around and asking people we know, but we can't find an easy way of getting hold of an es-419 or an ms profanity list to filter the codes against. As there are literally millions of codes per locale, we'd rather do an offline check than hit an API for each code (which would be expensive both in terms of bandwidth and usage fees).
I know this is a bit of a long shot, but does anyone know of a good source for profanity lists in different languages?
#disclaim: We know that no profanity filtering is perfect, that it's essentially futile with user-generated content and we have read SO #273516: How do you implement a good profanity filter? — that's not what we're asking.
Building or finding lists in other languages is extremely time consuming and difficult (trust me, we've built many of them at Inversoft). You might be better off tweaking the code generators instead (from what I could tell your code is generating the promotional codes rather than humans).
The best way to tweak a generator is to ensure that the codes can't easily form words based on the general use of consonants and vowels in most European languages. Things get a bit dicey in Polish and others, but it usually works.
Generally, most codes that start with a vowel are followed by another vowel or a non-joining consonant (like 'q' without a 'u'). If the code starts with a consonant then the next character is the same consonant or one that has a low probability of being used. For example, if you start with 's' then adding 'g' is a good choice.
You could also use wiktionary or other similar sources (like Linux dictionary files) to build a statistical approach to this. By extracting the probability of characters being next to each other, you should be able to generate codes with good accuracy of never being words in any language.
However, if I misread your question and you aren't generating the codes programmatically, you can ignore my response completely. :)
I have had the same thoughts. in trying to generate 6 character codes for a project i am doing.
I decided to reduce the likelyhood of obvious porfain codes So i removed the vowels that i found in as many "bad" words as i could think of, from my intial base 36 generation code. Leaving me with something more like a base 28 system that did not include a,e,i,o,u, 1,0. the one and zero were removed to reduce confusion between those characters in some fonts with I,L,O's
so far I have not seen a "profain" code genreated. Although base 28 has 1.something billion unique combinations.
i cannot vouch for other languages, and had not even considered it...
Are there any standard for keyboard short cut key localization?
I am developing one web application in this key suppose for "Submit" button I have set Alt + S as keyboard short cut key. This will work fine on English keyboard.
But what will happen on other (non-English) keyboards? Do we need to create separate short keys for each language?
Or will having one common English shortcut do? Are there any best practices for this?
Definitely, English short cuts won't do. Or...
There are two possible issues:
you will use short cut also used by (possibly localized) web browser or one of its extensions - it probably won't work
if you have forms with text area or text field where user can enter data, your short cuts might be mapped to one of national (diacritic) letters (i.e. right-Alt + a, right-Alt + C,...,etc. means something in Polish).
I do not think that any best practices exists. And I am not very fond of "localized" short cuts - I tend to use applications both in English and my mother's tongue and I really hate memorizing two sets of short cuts... What I think will work best is to give an opportunity for user to re-map keyboard short cuts. Although it is problematic from programming point of view. Alternatively you may decide on creating different sets of short cuts and allow users to switch between them (or suggest their mapping).
Most languages allow to 'tweek' to certain extend parts of the syntax (C++,C#) and/or semantics that you will be using in your code (Katahdin, lua). But I have not heard of a language that can just completely define how your code will look like. So isn't there some language which already exists that has such capabilities to override all syntax & define semantics ?
Example of what I want to do is basically from the C# code below:
foreach(Fruit fruit in Fruits)
{
if(fruit is Apple)
{
fruit.Price = fruit.Price/2;
}
}
I want do be able to to write the above code in my perfect language like this:
Check if any fruits are Macintosh apples and discount the price by 50%.
The advantages that come to my mind looking from a coder's perspective in this "imaginary" language are:
It's very clear what is going on (self descriptive) - it's plain English after all even kid would understand my program
Hides all complexities which I have to write in C#. But why should I care to learn that
if statements, arithmetic operators etc since there are already implemented
The disadvantages that I see for a coder who will maintain this program are:
Maybe you would express this program differently from me so you may not get all the
information that I've expressed in my sentence
Programs can be quite verbose and hard to debug but if possible to even proximate this type of syntax above maybe more people would start programming right? That would be amazing I think. I can go to work and just write an essay to draw a square on a winform like this:
Create a form called MyGreetingForm. Draw a square with in the middle of
MyGreetingFormwith a side of 100 points. In the middle of the square write "Hello! Click here to continue" in Arial font.
In the above code the parser must basically guess that I want to use
the unnamed square from the previous sentence, it'd be hard to write such a smart parser I guess, yet it's so simple what I want to do.
If the user clicks on square in the middle of MyGreetingForm show MyMainForm.
In the above code 'basically' the compiler must: 1)generate an event handler 2) check if there is any square in the middle of the form and if there is - 3) hide the form and show another form
It looks very hard to do but it doesn't look impossible IMO to me at least approximate this (I can personally generate a parser to perform the 3 steps above np & it's basically the same that it has to do any way when you add even in c# a.MyEvent=+handler; so I don't see a problem here) so I'm thinking maybe somebody already did something like this ? Or is there some practical burden of complexity to create such a 'essay style' programming language which I can't see ? I mean what's the worse that can happen if the parser is not that good? - your program will crash so you have to re-word it:)
Check out:
The Osmosian Order
of Plain English Programmers
Code Example:
The background is a picture.
A button has a box and a name.
To clear the status:
Clear the status' string.
Show everything.
To create the background:
Draw the screen's box with the white color.
Loop.
Pick a spot anywhere in the screen's box.
Pick a color between the lightest gray color and the white color.
Dab the color on the spot.
If a counter is past 80000, break.
If the counter is evenly divisible by 1000, refresh the screen.
Repeat.
Extract the background given the screen's box. \or Create the background from the screen. Or something.
Some Interactive fiction designers use a language syntax extremely close to the English language. Here's some Inform 7 code, which you can play online:
The foyer is a room.
The apple is in the foyer. It is edible. The description is "This is a ripe,
green granny smith apple."
The apple core is a thing. The description is "This apple core all that is
left of that granny smith apple you just consumed."
After eating the apple:
now the apple core is in the player;
say "You gobble down the apple careful not to eat any of those cyanide-
laced seeds you heard about."
I tutored a course that used Inform 7. One of the tutors had the impression the assignment was to design, not write a game. So he marked the programs by reading them, without realising they were actual programs.
I don't think that this would be an easy task nor do I think it is going to make life easier for debugging
How would you deal with these issues?
spelling mistakes
different dialects in different parts of world
different dialects in the same part of the world
synonyms
which part of sentence do you parse first?
tear (rip) and tear (from eye) both words spellings are the same but mean two different things.
Bring back COBOL or can you remember "Walk West", "Examine Door", "Push Door", "Open Door", "Use key on door" :)
edit - how would you strongly type this?
I have written an extensible English-to-Python compiler called EngScript, which converts structured English into working Python code.
This is an example of EngScript code:
print{create a string from the file called "README.txt"}
print{save the string "Woohoo!" to a file called "ExampleText.txt"}
print{the first 3 letters of "EngScript"}
This is the output that was generated by the EngScript compiler:
print(pythonFunctions.stringFromTextFile("README.txt"))
print(pythonFunctions.writeStringToFile("ExampleText.txt", "Woohoo!"))
print("EngScript"[0:(3 - 1)+1])
LiveCode!
There are a few "natural language", high-level, English-like programming or scripting languages. Probably all of them were inspired by the oldest, COBOL. My personal favorite of these languages is LiveCode. LiveCode is a decendent of MetaCard, a Linux clone of Apple’s now defunct HyperCard that used an English-like scripting language called HyperTalk, which was inspired by SmallTalk, and in turn inspired JavaScript (as well as the entire World-Wide-Web). HyperTalk was the basis for another English-Like scripting language called AppleScript (and later AppleScriptObjC), which still comes with macOS to this very day. LiveCode uses a language called LiveCodeScript, or LCS which, like other HyperCard clones and that have existed over the years (SuperCard, Adobe’s Lingo/Flash ActionScript, Open Xion, Oracle’s Toolbook, etc.), is very similar to HyperTalk at it’s core, often referred to as an X-Talk language. LiveCode has several advantages; it’s very much still in production, it has a dual license (open source and commercial versions), the engine is cross-platform (Mac, Win, Linux, HTML5, iOS, Android, and a server version), and like HyperCard it is also a GUI toolkit and it is extensible. The LiveCode team is currently working on new a lower-level programming language called LiveCode Builder, or LCB. LCB is also an English-like, although LCB is a bit less readable than LCS, it has a goals of having capabilities on par with lower-level languages like C++, Objective C, etc., allowing for extending the LiveCode platform with code libraries and frameworks produced by other programming language libraries, and ultimately allowing for the LiveCode IDE to be written in it’s own language.
Try using the programming language called 'Google' - it has a natural English interface and your code fragment throws back all the answers you are suggesting. Interestingly just six minutes after you asked this question, this very page is #1 for the query:
Check if any fruits are Macintosh
apples and discount the price by 50%
Use the Google API and I think you have the basis of a natural English programming language.
I'm creating an English translation for a program written in German (i.e. all strings within tr("...") are German). Users who are in a non-English non-German locale will probably want to see the English translation, but with the program as it is now they will see German.
There are some ways to solve this problem:
Check if it's a German locale and force to English otherwise.
Present an option to the user.
Make the programmers change their source code to English.
What is considered best-practice for internationalizing where the source code is not in English?
These are two separate questions.
The best practice is to not use any kind of hard-coded string in the sources.
Strings should be stored in external files and loaded by ID.
But what you have there does not sound like the best practice. Might be too much work to get it there.
What you describe (the tr("...") stuff) sounds like gettext (or something similar).
That approach for gettext (and similar libraries) is that "the stuff in the sources is the ultimate fallback", used if the strings for the desired language are not present.
In this case I would go with "Present an option to the user."
You can't assume the user knows English.
Real example: in Switzerland the official languages are Italian, German, French and Romansh. If I ask for French and it is not present, then the next best option is probably German, not English. I Canada the official languages are French and English, so if I as for French and is not available, the next best option is probably English.
I think the best option is asking the user (during installation probably).
Change the source to English is too costly and not worth it. I live in Brazil, we have tons of codes in Portuguese and translating to English wan't necessary one time (we do make software to english speakers). Unless you have a client that requires you to do so (usually when you are selling the source also).
Hope it helps
OK, so I guess the three options are:
Recompile the program with translated strings.
This is fraught with danger as you'll end up with two copies of the source. Bug-fixes in one will need to be done in the other. And then, what happens if you need French? Italian? Spanish? The only advantage of this approach is that it's feasible for a non-developer to do the work. (Just about.)
Resource out the strings, and automatically check what the UI locale is on load.
Here the strings are replaced with GetResource("key") or similar. On load the program automatically translates to the user's culture. This might work, but I know plenty of German-speakers who have English-language culture installed on their PCs but who would prefer German language programs at some points.
Resource out the strings and give the user the choice on load
In general it's always best to give the user control. This might be a prompt on load, although if the application is used often this can be an annoyance. Perhaps a balance is to ask the user during installation for their preference and then give then an option in a dialog to later change this setting.
Note, by the way, that translation is not localisation. For instance: number formats are quite different in Germany (e.g. 1.233,44) from English (e.g. 1,233.44). Icons and suchlike often have national characteristics.
I want to experiment with an idea I have of automatically localizing software, or at least suggesting a reasonable translation if a localized string is not available.
I'm not sure this will be working satisfactorily tomorrow morning but I just wanted to play with this idea.
Does anybody know of a dictionary that is free to use, and is in an easy to parse format, that can help me automatically translate words from English to other European languages (French, German, Spanish, etc)
The FreeDict project has quite a few relatively complete dictionaries. Most are from one language to english or vice versa, but some are between two non-english languages as well.
I don't know any dictionary but would like to point something out. You have to bear in mind that translating is not a direct word to word technique in any sense. The Rules of the language change as well and thus leave sentences unreadable. This is why even companies like Google have trouble making good translation software. Context is very hard to programmatically detect and context means everything in choosing the right word, the right structure and so on.
Maybe use a Translation API, if there is one. Google only seem to do a JavaScript API for Language.
You can't even expect to get a reasonable translation with an automatic method. Translating full texts is too hard for a computer to handle completely correct, translating short phrases correctly is impossible.
Take for example the simple text "Open", without a context it's not even possible to tell if it's a verb or an adjective. I know that at least in german that the verb and the adjective translates into two different words.
Also, computer specific concepts often borrow words from similar concepts outside the computer sphere. Those concepts often have a specific translation, but an automatic translation would sometimes try to translate it as if it was the original meaning, which can give you very strange translations.
After a while of searching i solved the problem by myself start to create my own dictionary. I do a lot of translations in my free time. In the beginning it is really boring work...but after a while you get an really good dicitionary. Some friends of mine using it too...so we all benefit from every new Word we translate.