[15:46] hey ebel! [15:47] hello! [15:47] How are you? [15:47] I'm good! [15:48] you? [15:49] good good [15:49] playing with open source machine translation, apertium [15:49] http://www.apertium.org/ [15:49] You can translate things offline on the command line http://www.technomancy.org/language/apertium-command-line/ [16:25] I'm not sure how I feel about the online interface... [16:25] oh, I guess the commandline interface is quite a bit better though [16:27] they don't have swahili... [16:35] yeah. [16:35] it's open source, so you have to make your own [16:36] it's from a spanish university, so it has loads of spanish languages [16:36] It doesn't have irish, our native language either. [16:40] well, I'm tempted to start one for swahili, but I'm not sure I trust my swahili... [16:47] :D [16:47] hehehe [16:47] you're swahili not so good? [16:48] not really :/ [16:49] well, better than nothing... [16:49] yeah [16:49] My irish is also terrible. I'm going to try to work on the irish one [16:51] I'm a big believer in 'worse is better' [16:51] than nothing? [16:51] http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html [16:51] cf. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better [16:51] most 'it must be perfect' systems never deliver and are always under development [16:52] even linux was like that [16:52] it was initially "just for fun" and "nothing big and professional" [16:55] I'm still reading the article (super slowly) [16:55] but are you talking about this?: http://xkcd.com/844/ [16:57] hehehe [17:00] ok. that makes sense. [17:00] this would be a more "open source" alternative [17:01] where the code needs to be readable so others can more easily edit it [17:05] well not really. [17:05] In closed source software, they still need to have readable code. [17:05] Since they have to maintain it. [17:05] yeah. true. [17:05] However I believe that if you have something that's half working, there will be more volunteers, [17:06] oooh, than if you have something that doesn't work at all [17:06] if you're paying people, you can tell them to work on the code/translation, so it doesn't matter if they aren't enthusiastic [17:06] because some user wants to make it perfect [17:06] e.g., if there was a half done swahili translation, but there was a few mistakes, you'd probably be much more likely to submit a few patches to make it work. [17:07] that's true. half the reason is I'm too lazy to figure out how to start the project >.< [17:08] hehehe [17:08] yeah apertium has some bad documentation. Lots of hunting around :) [17:13] I'm rather confused by his discussion at the end (http://www.jwz.org/doc/worse-is-better.html) about C++... [17:13] on one hand he's arguing for worse-is-better using C++ as an example [17:13] on the other he's saying that C++ sucks. === cong061 is now known as cong06 === cong061 is now known as cong06