Some thoughts on a language neutral web

I have been playing around with Google translation and transliteration APIs which I found is very useful to overcome the language barriers in using the web. This especially have a lot more importance as web is still not accessible to a vast majority of the people in the developing world due to many reasons.Even if it is accessible language becomes a barrier for most of the people to utilize its benefits as only very little resources will be available in their local language.To make the idea of having the knowledge accessible to everyone everywhere at anytime possible it is important to solve this language problem.

Think about this idea of viewing every web page in your local language.You choose the language in which you want to view the page and the browser translates the content of the page to the language of your choice.I know some of you might already know that it is possible with google translation toolkit.But I was not fully happy with google translation as it is not meant for a common man who knows only his local language.First of all the interface is still in English and the user has to copy paste the URL into the box and do translate to view the translated page.So this is not aimed at a common man who only knows his local language(other than English). What I was thinking about is to have a comprehensive solution which will lead to the idea of a language neutral web. Let me put my thoughts into 5 basic points.

1) Have a browser interface in local language.
Solution :Yes it is already available in some form.For example Firefox have a localization option by which you can change the interface to the language you wish.This is good and satisfies most of my requirements .But still this is just a replacement of English with corresponding local language words and the interface and technical terms is not easy to understand for a man without fundamental computer knowledge.I wish to see such an interface existing.

2)The user should be able to search in his local language.That means a search interface in local language where he can type in his local language and do search.
Solution : Yes this is possible as Google has a option to choose your local language and search in that language.Of course there are many other search engines with same capability.

3) In addition to search results in local language it should also bring the pages in other languages that matches the word user typed in his language and this test results should also be translated and shown in his language .

Solution : This is not currently available with Google search(I assume the same with any other search).

4) When the user clicks on any search results(or may be direct access of the page by typing the url) that web page should be opened and shown translated in his language if it is in a different language.That means any web page the user access should be translated and shown in his language if it is in a different language.
Solution : There are some tools and plug-ins available for Firefox which provides an auto-translate feature.Examples are FoxLingo and Worldwide lexicon. They basically uses Google translation or any other translation services. I found Worldwide lexicon plug-in most suitable as per my requirement but it is bit slow as it takes some time to translate the page stage by stage.

5) The user should be able to type in any web page in his local language and if the original web page is in not in his language the text input should be converted to that language while submitting.
Solution : I know Google transliteration can be used to type in your local language in any web page.But there is no direct way for the automatic conversion of the text in input box to the language of the web page .Of course you can copy paste the text after conversion in an indirect way.

Challenges

1) Some of the contents of the web which are not in textual format cannot be translated.
Eg. Images,flash ,sound and video files.
Also documents embedded or down-loadable from the web should be converted separately for viewing in his local language.

2)Machine translation is not yet 100% correct even though there are efforts from multiple sources to improve this.Also it is available only for few languages right now and developing translation algorithms for all the languages is a challenge.For eg. Google translation services are available only for 57 languages right now.

Benefits

1)The huge benefit I see is in making available huge knowledge base like Wikipedia and other sites to every one irrespective of their language. This is important as local language version of Wikipedia content is very limited compared to that in English and other major languages.This helps very much in education also.
2)The web developers need not worry about localization of their websites and is easy to reach about to a wide range of people using different languages.
3) Most importantly users are not restricted to use the service of any website because the website is in a different language. He will be able to view the site in his language and also will be able to interact in his language.

So is it achievable?

Yes. To a large extend still keeping the challenges in mind(And of course considering only textual data at the moment). Also you can see that among the 5 points only points 3 and 5 is not available as of know(As per my understanding) and that is also achievable with the existing technologies.Only thing which we are lacking is a comprehensive solution integrating all the five points which we discussed and I am sure it is going to happen.I request readers to put your thoughts and also to point out anything which I might have missed out.

DCI -A better OO paradigm?

DCI(Data Context and Interaction) has come up as a paradigm to guide you back to the essence of oo(Object Oriented) programming. Then the natural question is what is wrong in the way we perceive OO now?.Well there are a lot .The main problem is OO is designed to capture the end-users mental model in a computer.Are we really successful in using OO in that way. Definitely not.what we are trying to do is to build software on the four basic pillars(Abstraction,Encapsulation,Inheritance and polymorphism) that we believe as the base of OO design. In addition to that we have identified so may concepts like coupling,cohesion ,design patterns,AO(Aspect oriented)programming,DDD(Domain driven Design) etc. What are we really trying to solve here and why we have these many paradigms?. Please watch this video and you may not get all the points the speaker is trying to explain. Thinking in a different way is always difficult especially in the programming world where we are getting trained to follow the so called best practices and design principles. It is better refresh the mind sometimes ! .I am planning to have a separate post on DCI later, once I get a clear idea on practicing DCI.

Video
http://www.infoq.com/presentations/The-DCI-Architecture
Other References
http://www.artima.com/articles/dci_vision.html
http://blog.jaoo.dk/2009/03/04/handling-architecture-in-the-agile-world/
http://vimeo.com/8235574

Join twitter and follow great people

Back in 2008 when I heard about twitter I didn't feel anything special and had the feeling that it is not going to make in difference.It was the same feeling some people still have about people that what can you express within 140 characters.I also had the feeling that most of the people using twitter are doing only meaningless chatter without any seriousness.(And it is in fact true as per some analysis). But as twitter became much popular by the beginning of 2009 I thought of just having a try and soon after joining I realized the fact the real value in using twitter comes from choosing the right kind of people and follow them.I know there are some people who thinks how to get maximum no of followers and I have seen many articles on that. But what I want to point out here how I benefited from twitter as a programmer. Also note that I am a budding programmer with just few years of experience and looking forwards to find some great people and make friends with.

If you are some one who is serious about tweeting and want to benefit from that what you should really concentrate is to find the right kind of people to follow. I as a programmer was more interested in programming and technology and I chose great programmers and techies as per my interests.Of course you might have the question how many good programmers are available in twitter. That is right ,it might be very less and you might even think that what is that they are going to tell in 140 characters.So you may think that following their blogs is a better option. Of course following programmer blogs is really great thing and it might be also correct that more programmers blog than tweet . But still you can find many good programmers who tweet actively and the difference between tweets and blog is that you may not blog on everything you come across. But you can tweet on everything you are involved and even though it is very short it might light a spark in your mind or make you to google about some topic. And they usually tweet about their blog post as well as well as other people's blogs which are interesting .Tweets can contains links of the topics they found interesting and there might be retweets of other people which are interesting. In that way you are in fact finding a bunch of people around a the topics you are interested with and can share your ideas as well. Don't you think this is much more than blogging and just following blogs.

Coming to people who may follow you it is very important for people to understand what you more interested in from your tweets. This will help to attract the right kind of people who you can really interact with. If you want some great programmers you are following to follow you also it is important that you tweet more about programming.If you are a person who are a frequent twitter user and tweet about almost everything I suggest have a separate account for more personal tweets. Making friends with some great programmers is really great ,but do it carefully and step by step by understanding the person and they shouldn't feel like a nuisance initially. I personally benefited a lot by joining twitter and following great programmers.So if you are someone still hesitant about joining twitter, break that notion, have a try and experience the difference.