WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM - Catalan < > Spanish machine translation

Version 0.11 September 20, 2007

    use WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM;

    my $engine = WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM->new();

    my $translated_string = $engine->translate($string);

    # default language pair is Catalan -> Spanish
    # change to Spanish -> Catalan:
    $engine->from_into('es-ca');

    # check current language pair:
    my $current_langpair = $engine->from_into();

    # default output format is 'plain_text'
    # change to 'marked_text':
    $engine->output_format('marked_text');

    # check current output format:
    my $current_format = $engine->output_format();

    # configure a new interNOSTRUM object to store unknown words:
    my $engine = WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM->new(
                                                    output => 'marked_text',
                                                    store_unknown => 1,
                                                  );

    # get unknown words for source language = Spanish:
    my $es_unknown_href = $engine->get_unknown('es');

interNOSTRUM is a Catalan < > Spanish machine translation engine developed by the Department of Software and Computing Systems of the University of Alicante in Spain. This module provides an OO interface to the interNOSTRUM online translation engine.

interNOSTRUM provides approximate translations of Catalan into Spanish and Spanish into Catalan. It generates both the central variant of Oriental Catalan (the standard variant used in Catalonia) and Valencian forms, which follow the recommendations published in http://www.ua.es/spv/assessorament/criteris.pdf. For more information on the Catalan variants, see the References below.

Creates and returns a new WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM object.

    my $engine = WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM->new();

WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM recognizes the following parameters:

* lang_pair

The valid values of this parameter are:

* ca-es

Standard Catalan or Valencian into Spanish (default value).

* es-ca

Spanish into Standard Catalan.

* es-va

Spanish into Valencian.

* output

The valid values of this parameter are:

* plain_text

Returns the translation as plain text (default value).

* marked_text

Returns the translation with the unknown words marked with an asterisk.

* store_unknown

Off by default. If set to a true value, it configures the engine object to store in a hash the unknown words and their frequencies during the session. You will be able to access this hash later through the get_unknown method. If you change the engine language pair in the same session, it will also create a separate word list for the new source language.

IMPORTANT: If you activate this setting, then you must also set the output parameter to marked_text. Otherwise, the get_unknown method will return an empty hash.

The default parameter values can be overridden when creating a new interNOSTRUM engine object:

    my %options = (
                    lang_pair => 'es-ca',
                    output => 'marked_text',
                    store_unknown => 1,
                  );

    my $engine = WWW::Translate::interNOSTRUM->new(%options);

Returns the translation of $string generated by interNOSTRUM. $string must be a string of ANSI text, and can contain up to 16,384 characters. If the source text isn't encoded as Latin-1, you must convert it to that encoding before sending it to the machine translation engine. For this task you can use the Encode module or the PerlIO layer, if you are reading the text from a file.

In case the server is down, it will show a warning and return undef.

Changes the engine language pair to $lang_pair. When called with no argument, it returns the value of the current engine language pair.

Changes the engine output format to $format. When called with no argument, it returns the value of the current engine output format.

If the engine was configured to store unknown words, it returns a reference to a hash containing the unknown words (keys) detected during the current machine translation session for the specified source language, along with their frequencies (values).

The valid values of $lang_code are:

* ca

Source language is Catalan or Valencian.

* es

Source language is Spanish.

WWW::Mechanize 1.20 or higher.

WWW::Translate::Apertium

interNOSTRUM website:

http://www.internostrum.com/welcome.php

Department of Software and Computing Systems (University of Alicante):

http://www.dlsi.ua.es/index.cgi?id=eng

For more information on Catalan and its variants, see:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Catalan_language

Many thanks to Mikel Forcada Zubizarreta, coordinator of the interNOSTRUM project, who kindly answered my questions during the development of this module.

Enrique Nell, <perl_nell@telefonica.net>

Copyright (C) 2006 by Enrique Nell.

This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the same terms as Perl itself.