BeLingual - Haiku native text translator

[okabe]

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
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 Also sharing the pain and the knowledge with others can be fun too

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.

• The application is written and compiled under Haiku x64.
• The repository can be found here: GitHub - gkourgkoutas/BeLingual: A native program to translate text from one language to another
• All kind of contributions and help are welcome
  – If you have the skill and capacity/spare time, I would suggest to help out the Haiku devs, since this is a hobby project and they would be glad to get more programmers

Cheers!

[nipos]

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.