This can absolutely be done. There are three challenges you will face, though:
1. Reliably detecting the user's language. The most reliable method is to check
the browser's Accept-Language header, but that isn't necessarily accessible
from Javascript. A simple PHP or other script which would detect this and write
the appropriate destination language code would be most effective.
2. Chunking the contents of the page. Since the API has a length limit on
strings it will translate, you will need to chunk the contents in some way. I
would recommend walking through the DOM and checking whether an elements'
innerHTML length is less than 1200 or so when uri encoded. If you want to go
for fewer requests, you can set up a server-side proxy and send your
translation queries through the POST method via an XMLHttpRequest object.. If
you do this, you need to make sure the uri-encoded innerHTML is less than 5,000
characters long. That part is simple enough. The challenge you will hit is when
you run into a single text node that is too long. You'll need to figure out how
to split the string on a clause so that it will still translate reasonably
well. I would suggest a regular expression such as the one below:
encodeURIComponent(el.innerHTML).match(/(.{1,1200}[\.\,\n])/g);
This will look for clauses which, when uri-encoded, are up to 1200 characters
long and end with either a comma (,), period (.), or newline character.
3. HTML entities. The API will return special characters as HTML entities,
which will need to be translated into plain text in the case of text nodes. If
you search the web, there are a handful of scripts out there that you can get
the necessary matrices and regexps from.
A fourth, lesser challenge will be keeping the responses straight. To do this,
you need to use a method closure, which is essentially a function which returns
a function. The challenge will be figuring out if you want to replace all of
the innerHTML of an element with the response, or part of it (if the contents
were split).
All of these challenges are doable. In fact, I wrote a script that does this
very thing last week. It's for a client, though, so I can't just share it. And
by the way, dealing with the third challenge took up some 250 lines of code,
while all the rest of the script was less than 200.
Jeremy R. Geerdes
Effective website design & development
Des Moines, IA
For more information or a project quote:
http://jgeerdes.home.mchsi.com
[email protected]
If you're in the Des Moines, IA, area, check out Debra Heights Wesleyan Church!
On Jul 28, 2010, at 1:13 AM, [email protected] wrote:
> I want users of my site to be able to view contents in different
> languages. So I want to achieve that by creating a HTML drop down menu
> that will allow them to select language of their choice and the system
> detects the original language and then translate to the language
> selected.
> e.g English - French, french - Spanish, Spanish - English etc.
>
> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
> "Google AJAX APIs" group.
> To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
> To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
> [email protected].
> For more options, visit this group at
> http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en.
>
--
You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups
"Google AJAX APIs" group.
To post to this group, send email to [email protected].
To unsubscribe from this group, send email to
[email protected].
For more options, visit this group at
http://groups.google.com/group/google-ajax-search-api?hl=en.
