]> for &lib; &version; January 15, 2005 Jean-Yves Lefort jylefort@brutele.be &lib; is a library for translating text and web pages between natural languages. Its modular infrastructure allows to implement new translation services separately from the core library. &lib; is shipped with a generic module supporting web-based translation services such as Babel Fish, Google Language Tools and SYSTRAN. Moreover, the generic module allows to add new services simply by adding a few lines to a XML file (see the services.xml5 manual page). &lib; is implemented on top of the GLib Object System.

Unless noted otherwise, strings passed to library functions must be encoded in UTF-8. Unless noted otherwise, strings returned by &lib; are encoded in UTF-8. Unless noted otherwise, &lib; is thread-safe.

To compile a &lib; application, you need to tell the compiler where to find the &lib; header files and libraries. This is done with the pkg-config utility. The following interactive shell session demonstrates how pkg-config is used: $ pkg-config --cflags libtranslate -I/usr/local/include/libtranslate -I/usr/local/include/glib-2.0 -I/usr/local/lib/glib-2.0/include $ pkg-config --libs libtranslate -L/usr/local/lib -ltranslate -lgobject-2.0 -lglib-2.0 -liconv The simplest way to compile a program is to use the "backticks" feature of the shell. If you enclose a command in backticks (not single quotes), then its output will be substituted into the command line before execution. So to compile a &lib; Hello World, you would type the following: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libtranslate` hello.c -o hello

To compile a &lib; application using GNU Autoconf and GNU Automake, insert the following line at the appropriate place in the configure.ac file: PKG_CHECK_MODULES(LIBTRANSLATE, libtranslate,, [AC_MSG_ERROR([unable to find libtranslate])]) and insert the following lines in the appropriate Makefile.am file: bin_PROGRAMS = hello hello_SOURCES = hello.c hello_CPPFLAGS = $(LIBTRANSLATE_CFLAGS) hello_LDFLAGS = $(LIBTRANSLATE_LIBS)

To compile a &lib; module, you need to tell the compiler where to find the &lib; header files. This is done with the pkg-config utility. For instance, to compile a &lib; Hello World module, you would type the following: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags libtranslate` -shared -fPIC hello.c -o hello.so

To compile a &lib; module using GNU Autoconf, GNU Automake and GNU Libtool, insert the following line at the appropriate place in the configure.ac file: PKG_CHECK_MODULES(LIBTRANSLATE, libtranslate,, [AC_MSG_ERROR([unable to find libtranslate])]) and insert the following lines in the appropriate Makefile.am file: modulesdir = $(libdir)/libtranslate/modules modules_LTLIBRARIES = hello.la hello_la_SOURCES = hello.c hello_la_CPPFLAGS = $(LIBTRANSLATE_CFLAGS) hello_la_LDFLAGS = -avoid-version -module

&lib; loads modules from prefix/libtranslate/modules (where prefix is the prefix where &lib; is installed) and from ~/.libtranslate/modules (where ~ is the path to your home directory). Filenames not having the system-specific shared object extension (usually .so) are ignored.

To translate text or web pages, you need to initialize &lib; with a call to translate_init(), create a new session using translate_session_new(), and call the appropriate translation function, translate_session_translate_text() or translate_session_translate_web_page(). The following example demonstrates how to use &lib; for creating a simple command-line text and web page translator. The source code of this example is available in the &lib; source distribution (docs/reference/example-application.c), and is reproduced below. On UNIX, compile it as follows: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libtranslate` example-application.c -o example-application &example-application;

To implement a translation service, you need to create a subclass of TranslateService, create an instance of your subclass with g_object_new(), and add the service using translate_add_service(). If you are implementing support for a web-based service, just adding a definition to the services.xml file (without having to resort to C code) might be sufficient. See the services.xml5 manual page. The following example demonstrates how to create an add-on service for &lib;, and compile it either as a module or as a standalone application. The source code of this example is available in the &lib; source distribution (docs/reference/example-service.c), and is reproduced below. To build a module on UNIX, compile the source as follows: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags libtranslate` -shared -fPIC example-service.c -o example-service.so To build a standalone application on UNIX, compile the source as follows: $ cc `pkg-config --cflags --libs libtranslate` -DSTANDALONE example-service.c -o example-service &example-service;

&index-Object-Tree;

&translate; &translate-common; &TranslatePair; &TranslateService; &TranslateSession; &translate-util; The following tag to name mappings are built into &lib;. Calling translate_get_language_name() for any tag of this table will return its localized language name. &rfc3066-table;