Bloglation is a rails application that allows a user to translate any web page, save the translation and share it with others.
I started building it when I realized how bad Google Translate was while translating one of Paul Graham’s essays. I had to make a lot of corrections to convey the same message and also to make it more readable. I also came across Ryan Tomayko’s How I explained REST to my wife (tomayko.com/writings/rest-to-my-wife), and realized that there are people out there who are passionate about something and want non-English speakers to read and learn (and vice versa).
Ultimately, I think it’s all about spreading knowledge, ideas and concepts across any borders. My motivation for initial translation was to teach Korean-speaking folks about Silicon Valley’s startup culture (because it’s only other language I know besides English), especially why it’s important to start and fail early. I really wish I could have read Paul Graham’s “Why to not not start a startup” when I was in college. I probably wouldn’t have made the same choices.
I am hosting the site at Heroku for free, thus not much horsepower. Worse yet, it scrapes other web pages and uses Google Translate API, thus it’s will be slow. You may even get “connection timeout” error. I’d like to add “background job” or more “dynos” features to increase performance once I find a job. Currently it works well with Wordpress blog, Typepad blog, Google’s official blog, and Paul Graham’s essays.
(The MIT License)
Copyright © 2010 Yang Chung
Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the ‘Software’), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:
The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.
THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED ‘AS IS’, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.