Experimental: App Translator with A.I. Auto Translation!

[Mario]

Since (I hope) I've shipped the last release of IMatch for this year, I now spend some time with doing research, learning new stuff etc.

One of my test areas are cloud-based and A.I. services and how I can put them to good use for IMatch users.

IMatch already uses cloud services like GeoNames, Google Maps or Bing Maps for the Map Panel and some other features.
The next step will be to utilize artificial intelligence (A.I.) to make IMatch smarter and reduce the work for you. Let the machine do the repetitive and boring things, free time for new photography 

As I explained to Mees recently in an email, my first testbed for this will be the App Translator. Yep!
My developer relations with Microsoft give me access to free (but limited) A.I. cloud resources. This makes this ideal to test out new things, and then decide whether or not it is worth paying for.

Today I've enhanced the App Translator to utilize cloud-based A.I. for automatic translation of apps.
While this is surely not 100% accurate (yet), the grunt work of translating button texts, captions and the like can be done by a machine quite reliably.
This makes translating IMatch apps faster. The human translator can concentrate on proof-reading and doing the occasional correction.

This is still a work in progress and I see to subtle problems caused by the specific nature of app resources, but for one day of work it's quite remarkable.

Here is the App Translator doing automatic translations (currently only per value, I will make it so it can do all values in one go).
This is a real-time video, showing me auto-translating 3 values:



The source text in the upper field is sent to the Microsoft cloud (Azure), translated and the result is displayed in the lower field.

The ability to integrate such services (and to keep up with the rapid enhancements and changes) was one of the driving forces behind the IMWS integration into IMatch and the switch to web-based technologies for apps. I expect many awesome enhancements to evolve from this area in 2018...

[zematima]

Amazing.
This will make translations a lot easier.
Thank you.

[Mees Dekker]

Looks very promising.

[Mario]

Absolutely!
Getting a rough translation into a new language with a single click will save a lot of time.
Even if you have to manually check each translation once afterwards. The translator has no knowledge of the context in which the text is used and this can cause issues.
But it gets most things right, especially since Microsoft switched from a static translation system to system based on a neutral network. Much better.

But there are some things I need to handle. Or at least 'flag' for the human translator so he/she pays extra attention.
For strings with special characters or inline HTML code, for example.

Did you notice that, in the large text translation at the end, the text

Open a translation|To open

was translated (correctly) into

Eine Übersetzung öffnen | Um eine Übersetzung...

but the translation also added a blank before and after the | symbol.
This will break the internal logic of the app. The app splits the value at the | to get the headline and content for a message box. The translation will show an extra space for each, which does not look nice. This is of course not a frequent case, but it shows that I need to carefully analyze what is returned and which options are available.

Thankfully Microsoft gives us 2 million characters of translation per month free of charge. That's plenty for testing and translating a lot of apps. Or IMatch 
If I would need more, it would cost me 10US$ + tax for every million of characters translated.