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)
• Python >= 2.4
• A reasonably fast computer (a 1.2Ghz Pentium, with 256Mb RAM is fast enough if completely unloaded.)

Installing

Debian

If you're running Debian unstable (sid), just:

$ sudo apt-get install apertium-tolk

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.

$ svn co http://apertium.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/apertium/trunk/apertium-tolk

Version 0.1, pair: Macedonian to Serbo-Croatian.

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

Install dbus-x11

If you get a message that dbus-launch is missing, like this:

  File "/var/lib/python-support/python2.4/dbus/bus.py", line 125, in __new__
    bus = cls._new_for_bus(address_or_type, mainloop=mainloop)
dbus.exceptions.DBusException: org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.Spawn.ExecFailed: Failed to execute dbus-launch 
to autolaunch D-Bus session

Then in Debian/Ubuntu you need to install the dbus-x11 package.

Python encodings

If you get the following error, it means that for some reason UTF-8 is not the default Python 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 apertium\/  | 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 :)

Feature requests

• 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.

Related software

• Apertium-view is a similar, but more complicated GUI tool which shows you every stage of the Apertium pipeline.
• Apertium-viewer is an improved version of Apertium-view, which does not require dbus and which is written in Java