Apertium: Free open source language translator

Came across a very cool "free" and "open source" tool to translate text from one language to another.

It's "Apertium" => "A free/open-source machine translation platform".

https://www.apertium.org

Excerpt from the site:

Apertium is a free/open-source machine translation platform, initially aimed at related-language pairs but expanded to deal with more divergent language pairs (such as English-Catalan). The platform provides a language-independent machine translation engine tools to manage the linguistic data necessary to build a machine translation system for a given language pair and linguistic data for a growing number of language pairs.

You can try the UI at https://www.apertium.org to translate sample text from one language to another.

Wiki and documentation related to it can be found at http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page

It also has a variety of tools for users / translators and developers: http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Tools

Apertium tools for users / translators

Apertium tools for developers

The installation steps are very easy. Just follow the one suitable for your OS at: http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Installation

Here is a video explaining the download, install process and command line usage of it for Ubuntu: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vy7rWy2u_m0

Below are the steps to install and use in a fresh new Ubuntu system:

1. Download stable-release sh script and run it to add Apertium package key to Ubuntu and to update the packages list.

$ wget https://apertium.projectjj.com/apt/install-release.sh -O - | sudo bash

2. To install all the core Apertium tools run:

$ sudo apt-get install apertium-all-dev

3. Download a language pair for your conversion use. You can search for your language pair here at http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/List_of_language_pairs. For this example case, we will be downloading spanish-english language pair for conversion:

"apertium-en-es"  => English <-> Spanish

$ sudo apt-get install apertium-en-es

4. Now finally time to test it:

The command syntax is apertium <language-of-given-text>-<language-to-be-translated>

In our case, we will be translating from Spanish to English:

$ echo 'gracias' | apertium es-en

o/p: thank you

Now we will try to convert this spanish sentence "Tengo Un Mes Estudiando Español" which in english means "I've been learning Spanish for 1 month".

$ echo 'Tengo Un Mes Estudiando Español' | apertium es-en

o/p: Have A Month Studying Spanish

Same translation from google translate results in:

I have a month studying Spanish

Seems like Apertium translation result is quite similar to google translate result. This is great, coming from a free and open source tool. Hope you find use for it in your applications :)

Getting started with Redis

As per redis home page,

"Redis is an open source (BSD licensed), in-memory data structure store, used as database, cache and message broker. It supports data structures such as strings, hashes, lists, sets, sorted sets with range queries, bitmaps, hyperloglogs and geospatial indexes with radius queries."

Redis Installation Steps:

I am trying the below steps in an ubuntu 14.04 system. Open the terminal and issue the below commands:

1. Get the latest tar zip for redis (http://redis.io/download)

$ cd /path/to/download/directory/
$ wget http://download.redis.io/releases/redis-3.0.7.tar.gz

2. Untar it and issue below commands:

$ tar xf redis-3.0.7.tar.gz

$ cd redis-3.0.7

$ make

$ sudo make install

Getting started with Redis:

1. Run redis server in one console:

$ redis-server

or as a background process:

$ redis-server &

2. You can interact with redis now using the built-in client in console:

$ redis-cli

redis> set name Satej

OK

redis> get name

"Satej"

If you are a newbie at Redis like me, give a try at the online interactive tutorial: http://try.redis.io/. It's real fun and easy.

I learnt some basic data types and their related operations from the tutorial:
- integer
- string
- list
- set
- sorted sets
- hashes