[opensource-dev] in-viewer translation: alternative services, usage statistics (was: in-viewer translation is dead soon.)

Boroondas Gupte sllists at boroon.dasgupta.ch
Sun May 29 16:19:06 PDT 2011


On 05/28/2011 02:00 AM, Philippe (Merov) Bossut wrote:
> It shouldn't be too hard to substitute with another service. Someone
> has an alternative service to propose?
As Daniel has pointed out
<https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2011-May/007104.html>,
we have to be careful to not put an undue load on a service provider
with the probably vast translation call volume SL viewers generate. Not
all services will be as well-backed as Google's, and even for Google the
'economic burden' is the argument for deprecating the API.

So whatever service we choose, it'd be good to ask its provider in
advance whether it can cope with our amount of requests. To ask them,
though, we would first have to know ourselves, how many queries there
will be (roughly. More on that below.)

On 05/28/2011 07:47 AM, Pat Nad wrote
<https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2011-May/007103.html>:

> I think a good alternative Microsoft offer is the Bing translator, all
> the infos can be found here: http://www.microsofttranslator.com/dev/
>
> they have AJAX, SOAP and REST API
I guess the REST API would be most interesting to us. (The currently
used API is a REST ones, too.)

On 05/29/2011 03:34 PM, Argent Stonecutter wrote
<https://lists.secondlife.com/pipermail/opensource-dev/2011-May/007114.html>:

> Changing the way SL uses the API isn't going to change Google's mind.
>
> The logical thing to do, it seems to me, is to see if LL can license access.
If that's possible (and affordable), that'd be a good solution, I guess.
Though, Google would probably want to know how many requests we would
expect our project to generate, and I don't think we (incl. LL)
currently have any statistics on that. Off course, LL might know how
much chat is sent around in total on their grid (counting messages
several times when they're received by several clients). Multiplied with
the ratio of residents that have translation enabled, one should get the
number of translation queries.

One could also get the statistics right from Google itself
<http://code.google.com/apis/console-help/#monitoringandfiltering>, if
one uses an API key in the requests. Google's API keys aren't meant to
identify individual developers or individual end users, but rather
projects, such that hard-coding a single key in the Viewer wouldn't be a
problem. (Except that someone not related to the project might snatch
the key from our sources and use it, too. But as keys can be generated
for free <http://code.google.com/apis/console-help/#generatingdevkeys>
from every Google account, there's little incentive to do so.)

In Version 2
<http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/language/translate/v2/getting_started.html>
of the Google Translate API, using a key is required. (And you won't get
any results back without one.) However, the SL Viewer still uses
<https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development/src/a36a329e77cc/indra/newview/lltranslate.cpp#cl-39>
Version 1
<http://code.google.com/intl/en/apis/language/translate/v1/getting_started.html>
of the API, where passing a key is optional, and it indeed doesn't send
one
<https://bitbucket.org/lindenlab/viewer-development/src/a36a329e77cc/indra/newview/lltranslate.cpp#cl-77>.

Note that both versions of the API are being deprecated, so there's
probably no reason anymore to upgrade the the newer one. Using an API
key for the time remaining might pay off though, so we get some numbers.

Cheers,
Boroondas
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