Apertium-tolk

apertium-tolk is a program which translates as you type.

What you need

Version 0.2, pair: French to Spanish.

• The Apertium D-Bus Service
• A working Apertium 3.0 installation (note: this must be installed)

Getting apertium-view

Debian

There are debian packages available here. Note: any language pair you want to use will need to be installed from a Debian package as well.

SVN

Check out the apertium-tolk from the subversion repository.

Feature requests

Version 0.1, pair: Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian.

• Focus on text entry box, not on exit button
• Tooltip to say "type text in this box to translate".
  • Alternatively, just put text in the box that disappears when you click.

Troubleshooting

Restart D-Bus

The solution to both of the problems below is typically to restart D-Bus. You can do this on Debian and Ubuntu by issuing the following command:

$ sudo /etc/init.d/dbus restart

Method does not exist

org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.UnknownMethod: Method "translate" with signature "a{ss}s" on interface 
"org.apertium.Mode" doesn't exist

Unable to guess signature

  ERROR:dbus.connection:Unable to set arguments ({}, 'A') according to signature None: 
  exceptions.ValueError: Unable to guess signature from an empty dict
  Unable to guess signature from an empty dict

Python encodings

If you get the following error, it means that for some reason UTF-8 is not the default encoding on your system:

UnicodeEncodeError: 'ascii' codec can't encode character u'\xe1' in
position 1: ordinal not in range(128)

You can fix this by making a sitecustomize.py file in either /usr/lib/python2.5/site-packages/ or /usr/lib/python2.4/site-packages/ (whichever corresponds to your version of Python) with the following contents:

# sitecustomize.py
# this file can be anywhere in your Python path,
# but it usually goes in ${pythondir}/lib/site-packages/
import sys;
sys.setdefaultencoding('utf-8');

Machine grinds to a halt

This is probably because either you're running apertium-tolk on an old machine, or the machine is heavily loaded, if you look in your process list ($ ps axu) you will probably see many instances of Apertium running.

You can kill them using:

$ ps ax | grep modes\/  | cut -f2 -d' ' | xargs kill

Unfortunately the only ways to stop this are either, decrease load on your current machine, buy a new machine or fix the code. Its a known issue, and we're working on it, but we could always do with some help :)

Related software

• Apertium-view is a similar, but more complicated GUI tool which shows you every stage of the Apertium pipeline.