I remembered that about two years ago, I patched Drupal in order to get automatic translation using Google Translate. At that time, Google translate did not provide any web services API, nor AJAX, and the translation of text containing HTML tags was very poor. The patch was doing simple HTTP requests, parsing of the HTTP response, some simple cleanup and in the end, it stored the translation into the Drupal locale messages.
Google Translate nowadays has much more languages than it used to backthen is AJAX based and offers web services, too. I was wondering how does it handle HTML tags and how hard would be to get it into the Moodle language editor. After 2 hours of coding and reading its API, I came up with this (sorry for JQuery, I know Moodle likes YUI):
$translang = preg_replace('/_.*/', '', $currentlang);
echo '
<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script type="text/javascript">
google.load("language", "1")
google.load("jquery", "1.4.1")
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">
$(document).ready(function() {
$("form .translator .stren").click(function() {
var src = $(this);
var dst = $("[name=\'stringXXX" + this.id + "\']")
var tokens = [];
var text = src.text().replace(/\$a(->\w*)?/g, function(match) {
return "TK" + (tokens.push(match)-1);
});
google.language.translate(text, "en", "' . $translang .'", function(result) {
if (!result.error) {
dst.text(result.translation.replace(/TK\d+/g, function(match) {
return tokens[match.substring(2)];
})).css("background-color", "yellow")
}
})
})
});
</script>';
This will allow a translator to click on any string in the Language editing section and get a Google translation for that string. The translation is saved in the corresponding textarea (which is marked with yellow). You can then check, edit, undo, or save these changes.
