BeLingual - Haiku native text translator

Hello All,

as stated here: How To get Started with Contributions? I wanted to write a native application for Haiku which is able to translate text like DeepL does.

I got the inspiration from:

  1. Lingua which is already available, however it is dictionary based and I want something for whole texts like DeepL

  2. Haikus new Network Services which gave me the final Idea to write a program which can communicate whit services like DeepL or FreeDict.

  3. The fact that I really dislike that everything is done in a browser and I prefer standalone programs more.

Since I really enjoy Haiku and use it as a daily driver, I wanted to contribute back to the community as much as I’m able to.

Disclaimer: I started this project to get a little more familiar with the technical side of Haiku and to learn how to program tools for it. I’m not a professional developer, and I don’t intend to become one :slight_smile:
I learned OOP (with .NET) but that’s a lot of moons ago. I know the basic concepts etc. but never wrote programs in a professional environment (company or enterprise).

If people are interested and/or new to writing code and contribution, maybe this is a project you can join!? If you never forked a project or did a pull request, this can be the place to try out all the stuff you want :smiley: Also sharing the pain and the knowledge with others can be fun too :smiley:

Now about the application:

My idea is to replicate DeepL’s two panel view, where you paste your desired text input on the left and get the results on the right, with alternative results/words at the bottom. If you’re not familiar with DeepL try it out, it is definately better than googles translator.
DeepL also provides a free API where you can translate up to 500000 characters per month.

I don’t want to limit the program itself to only sent requests to DeepL. FreeDict is also an option and provides an API, however the results are not as good/acurate as DeepL’s.

Cheers!

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That sounds like a really interesting project and a good point to get started with Haiku development again.
I can’t contribute anything right know as my C++ knowledge is very limited and I have no idea how to add things from that point,but I may join later,when there’s more code I can first read and then extend.
One thing that instantly came to my mind was adding support for the LibreTranslate API.
I may try to do that when DeepL API access is mostly working.
If you don’t know LibreTranslate,that’s another translation API service which is open-source and can be selfhosted,it doesn’t have any API limits and doesn’t need an API key,but the translation quality isn’t as good as DeepL.

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