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Mingaling - Ver. 0.737


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#1 DustinWehr

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Posted 10 September 2010 - 08:09 PM

Maintainer: DustinWehr
Creator: Dustin Wehr

Ext. Version: 0.737
Release date: 2010-09-09
Description: Slightly-longer summary:
Helps you learn the vocabulary of a foreign language. You add words and phrases in your language, and when they appear on the pages you visit, they're replaced by Google's translation into the foreign language. Hover your cursor over a translated phrase and a tooltip will popup that tells you the original.

Feature request? Try this: http://goo.gl/97uVn6

Instructions and verbose description:
Example: After you install Mingaling, you highlight "sentence" in this sentence, then right click and select "Add phrase". Since this is the first time you've used Mingaling, you'll be asked to choose a source language (the one you already know) and a target language (the one you want to practice). You can change this later. Let's say you choose English as the source language and Spanish as the target language. Mingaling sends "sentence" to Google, shows you what Google says the Spanish translation of "sentence" is ("frase"), and then asks for a confirmation. Click ok. Now every occurrence of "sentence" on this page will be replaced with "frase", highlighted - you can pick a highlight color in the preferences. If you hover your cursor over one of those bolded occurrences of "frase", a tooltip will show up with the word "sentence".

Here is the main hypothesis: often enough, when "frase" occurs in a sentence you're reading, the context in combination with you memory will be enough to remind you of what it means. And if you do remember what it means, then you've done a tiny bit of solid practice, and the association between "frase" and "sentence" in your brain becomes a tiny bit stronger.

Disclaimer: Mingaling currently does not try to do word sense disambiguation. For example, it would translate "bark" the same way in the sentences "That dog has an annoying bark" and "The tree's bark is sticky". Maybe some day it will be good at this, or good enough that it's not a major complaint. Until then, you might want to stick to practicing words and phrases that do not have multiple meanings that are both commonplace and unrelated. Yes, it'd be great if Mingaling always chose a good translation, but it should still be a little beneficial if it replaces (say) the word "milk" in the sentence "Who is going to milk the cow?", with the Russian word "молоко", which refers to the liquid produced by mammals, even though a better translation would be the verb "доить".

Usage, continued:
You can access some options through the add-on bar icon (bottom of screen), navigation bar icon (where search box is), or the Tools menu, and each of those access points can be disabled in Mingaling's preferences.

If Mingaling garbles the layout of a page you're viewing (it should only garble sentences), or if it's annoying you for whatever reason, you can enable/disable all translation by left-clicking the add-on bar icon, or by selecting "Disable all translations" after clicking the navigation bar icon or accessing the Tools submenu menu.

Besides the tooltip feature, another way to prevent Mingaling from slowing your reading speed down too much is by telling it not to translate two phrases if they are too close to each other. Right-click the status bar icon, or left-click the navigation bar icon, then select "Translate more/less often". By default, there needs to be at least 2 characters between two translated phrases; for example, if you've told Mingaling to translate "sentence" and "long-winded", then by default Mingaling will translate "long-winded" but not "sentence" in the text "long-winded sentence". If you change the number to 1, both will get translated.

To make Mingaling stop translating a phrase: highlight it or its translation, then right-click and select "Remove phrase". If you click "Remove phrase" or "Add phrase" with no text selected, you'll be presented with an empty box to enter some text.

You can practice more than one language. Mingaling will keep a separate record for each pair of languages (source language, target language) you've used.

Patterns: If you use this extension often, you may find it's annoying to have to add derived/inflected forms of a word one-at-a-time. If you click "Add phrase" with no text selected, then you can enter word-patterns using the characters * and ?. Mingaling will automatically translate words that match your pattern: ? stands for any one character or nothing, and * stands for 0 or more characters. For example, if you enter "wr?t*", then eventually (once or if they occur on a page you're reading) each of the words "write", "wrote", "written", "writing", "writ", "wretch", etc will be added to your translations.

Import/export translation lists: there are buttons for this in the preferences.

SUPPORT:
If you encounter any problems, or if something just annoys you, please send email! You'll definitely get a quick response, and bugs will be fixed quickly once they've come to my attention. The address to use is "mingaling.the.extension" followed by "@gmail.com".
Extension is compatible to: ( 3.5 - 34.*)

Included locales: de en-US fr he nl pt-BR ru sr sv-SE zh-CN

View on WTS -- Download the extension

Edited by DustinWehr, 07 December 2014 - 06:05 PM.


#2 Goofy

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Posted 11 September 2010 - 06:47 AM

Hello and welcomeani.gif

It is a pleasure to see that some developers take care of documenting their creation to this extent, great.

Just a bit of information for you:
  • in case you have some queries about the WTS, you can find short and simple Questions&Answers about it here!
  • Volunteer translators can now register and do their job, you will be automatically notified by mail when they register and when they have done with it.
  • In case you're looking for a specific translator, please see the list of available translators on BabelZilla.
    When you select the desired one, you can send him/her a P.M. or an e-mail (if and when public).
  • You may also insert a new Topic in the Help Section, in order to ask for specific translations, to write a general request about missing translations, etc.

Think Global, Make Locales!


Sometimes I am on irc://moznet/BabelZilla
but you can also drop a word in the shoutbox

#3 Lakrits

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Posted 11 September 2010 - 01:31 PM

Hi,

I just translated ming-a-ling to Swedish (come to think of it, shouldn't it be able to do that by itself one day?), and there is one thing that stands out when you read the translated program text after installing the add-on. The language names are all in English. That's not of any concern if all the other words are all in English too, but it doesn't look or feel too good when reading the program's messages.

E.g. one string starts "Ange frasen på %1$S, eller dess %2$S översättning", which produces the following message:

"Ange frasen på Swedish, eller dess English översättning (...)"

If I turn the tables, the same message would say: "Enter svenska phrase, or its engelska translation (...)".

So, I would like to suggest either

1) that you somehow (I don't know the first thing about coding) make this automatic, using Google's own translations of language names, or
2) that you include a list of all the languages that are available, and let us translators translate them.

The only "problems" are the use of capital letters of language names inside sentences (compare the texts above), which is something that doesn't end the world if it can't be solved, and grammar, which you can work around. I am too ignorant of how to work around grammatical differences using programming, but here's an comparative example between Swedish and English. You might be able to figure something out:

In English, the word for the language English (which is "English", by the way) is the same regardless of genus and plural form. In addition, you have the article "the", Swedish has articles and suffixes that change according to genus and plural. In Swedish, some translations with the word "engelska (språket)" ("English (language)") reads:

En engelsk översättning (An English translation)
Två engelska översättningar (Two English translations)

En översättning till engelska (A translation to English)
Två översättningar till engelska (Two translations to English)

Den engelska frasen (The English phrase)
De engelska fraserna (The English phrases)
Frasen är engelsk (The phrase is English)
Frasen är på engelska (The phrase is in English)

Det engelska ordet (The English word)
De engelska orden (The English words)
Ordet är engelskt (The word is English)
Ordet är på engelska (The word is in English)
"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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#4 DustinWehr

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Posted 12 September 2010 - 02:21 AM

Thanks Lakrits!

I'm sorry you needed to inform me of these issues regarding the language names. Thanks for all the examples - they were helpful. Fixing this is a high priority for me now. I want the grammar to be correct, but I haven't come up with a good solution yet. I can ask Google to translate into Swedish (and all the other language that need a localization) all of the language names that they support. For example, the query

Arabic. Bulgarian. Catalan. Chinese. Chinese-simplified.
Chinese-traditional. Croation. Czech. Danish. Dutch.
English. Estonian. Filipino. Finnish. French. German.
Greek. Hebrew. Hindi. Hungarian. Indonesian. Italian.
Japanese. Korean. Latvian. Lithuanian. Norwegian.
Persian. Polish. Portuguese. Romanian. Russian. Serbian. Slovak.
Slovenian. Spanish. Swedish. Thai. Turkish. Ukrainian. Vietnamese.

yields:

Arabiska. Bulgariska. Katalanska. Kinesiska. Kinesiska-förenklas.
Kinesisk traditionell. Kroatiska. Tjeckiska. Danska. Nederländska.
Engelska. Estniska. Filippinska. Finska. Franska. Tyska.
Grekiska. Hebreiska. Hindi. Ungerska. Indonesiska. Italienska.
Japanska. Koreanska. Lettiska. Litauiska. Norska.
Persiska. Polska. Portugisiska. Rumänska. Ryska. Serbiska. Slovakiska. Slovenian. Spanska. Svenska. Thai. Turkiska. Ukrainska. Vietnamesiska.

As you have informed me, these are not all the needed strings. But it'd be better than the current situation, right? And this won't require extra work by you and other translators.

Dustin


#5 Lakrits

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Posted 12 September 2010 - 03:52 PM

You're welcome,

One other thing.

I downloaded and installed your update, where you've include my translated locale files. However, you forgot to amend the chrome.manifest file with information on localisations. It says:

CODE
(...)
locale mingaling en-US locale/en-US/
(...)


That means my locale files aren't recognised, and ming-a-ling is still in English. You need to add a new locale row with information on where to find the sv-SE locale files. That is easiest done by simply copy the en-US locale row, add a new row, paste the copied row and then alter the two "en-US" in the new locale row to "sv-SE":

CODE
(...)
locale mingaling en-US locale/en-US/
locale mingaling sv-SE locale/sv-SE/
(...)


And then continue to add locale information for each new translation.

The entire mended chrome.manifest file should look like this:

CODE
content mingaling content/
locale mingaling en-US locale/en-US/
locale mingaling sv-SE locale/sv-SE/
skin mingaling classic/1.0 skin/
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://mingaling/content/browserOverlay.xul
style chrome://global/content/customizeToolbar.xul chrome://mingaling/skin/overlay.css
resource mymodules0 content/


Now's time for coffee!
"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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#6 DustinWehr

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Posted 12 September 2010 - 11:06 PM

Lakrits,

Frustrating! I never completed that update, because Babelzilla informed me of the omission you just mentioned, but apparently Babelzilla uploaded the new file anyway. Actually there's a second reason I intended to cancel that update, which is that I don't have translations for the 250-character add-on summary, and the longer "More about this add-on" and "Developer comments" sections that appear on the ming-a-ling homepage (aside: only the "Contributors" part of the Developer's comments section is important).

Of course, that's my fault. I've only just now learned, from babelwiki, of how to upload arbitrary text files to Babelzilla (since when you upload a .xpi file, Babelzilla only extracts the .dtd and .properties files within it). Anyway, you're probably thinking that the program text that you've already translated is more important than the stuff that appears on the homepage, and I'd agree with you there. So before I go and try to use the "upload" feature mentioned in babelwiki, I'll correct the chrome.manifest file as you instructed. Again, thanks for the clear instructions!

#7 Lakrits

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Posted 13 September 2010 - 12:01 AM

No problems. My ego isn't large enough to really be upset over this. We all make mistakes, and this wasn't one of the pivotal ones. It is interesting though, that this is the same mistake I did at first (without realising it) which led to a one year halt in me testing my translations before peddling them to you developers. I guess this is a pretty common lapsus at Babelzilla.

QUOTE (DustinWehr @ Sep 13 2010, 00:06) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Again, thanks for the clear instructions!

Don't mention it. I have relatives in Canada (Whitehorse and Toronto, and one in Chicago), so I know how to lower myself to your level. ;)

Lakrits

"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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Moderator for the Swedish BabelZilla forum section

#8 DustinWehr

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 05:18 AM

QUOTE (Lakrits @ Sep 12 2010, 23:01) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Don't mention it. I have relatives in Canada (Whitehorse and Toronto, and one in Chicago), so I know how to lower myself to your level. ;)

ha!

#9 markh

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 06:58 AM

What a great addon, a brilliant idea, congrats! Dutch locale added, tested and released cool.gif

By the way, if you change in your install.rdf
CODE
<em:homepageURL>http://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/9635/</em:homepageURL>

to
CODE
<em:homepageURL>http://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/addon/9635/</em:homepageURL>

users will be directed to the page in their locale instead of the en-US one (except when their locale IS en-US or is not present in AMO, obviously) wink.gif
While the bankers all get their bonuses I’ll just get along with what I’ve got


#10 DustinWehr

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 07:27 AM

That's very encouraging! Thank you so much!

Now I'm going to go fix that install.rdf file, add your new translations, and reupload to Mozilla.

#11 DustinWehr

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 08:29 AM

Thanks Lakrits and JackAlexander for educating my ignorant ass about the grammatical subtleties involving language names in Swedish and Russian (if you're curious, see thread started by Lakrits in previous topic). Actually it's worse than that; I completely forgot that the names of the languages that Google supports ("Arabic", "Bulgarian", "Catalan", "Chinese", ...) all need to be traduit according to the user's locale. That much will be fixed soon.

As for the grammatical subtleties... I imagine Swedish and Russian are not the only languages that require e.g. "French" to be traduit in several different ways depending on part-of-speech. I'm currently favoring Jack's proposal for how to deal with this, which involves rewriting some of the strings in the file "mingaling.properties":
QUOTE
One idea that comes to mind is just put the language name in quotations, like:
There is no "French" language translation available.

Might get awkward, but will be grammatically correct, such as in:
Whenever ming-a-ling replaces a phrase in the language "French", it will
then...

Just to give you a hands on exemple. In Russian,
"French" the language is "Frantsuzskiy",
"translate from French" is "perevodit' iz Frantsuzskogo"
"phrase in French" is "fraza po Frantsuzski"

And many others exist. It would definitely not be practical to create parameters for all of them, especially since the word preceding the language name changes too smile.gif

So here is my question: will this suffice for other languages?

#12 markh

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 08:38 AM

QUOTE (DustinWehr @ Sep 14 2010, 08:29) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
So here is my question: will this suffice for other languages?

It will for Dutch wink.gif
While the bankers all get their bonuses I’ll just get along with what I’ve got


#13 Lakrits

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 04:19 PM

Swedish language files uploaded, but not tested due to an unexpected hardware failure on the user's part. The computer, however, works fine.
"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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#14 markh

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 05:53 PM

QUOTE (Lakrits @ Sep 14 2010, 16:19) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
Swedish language files uploaded, but not tested due to an unexpected hardware failure on the user's part. The computer, however, works fine.

PEBKAC?
While the bankers all get their bonuses I’ll just get along with what I’ve got


#15 Lakrits

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 07:46 PM

QUOTE (markh @ Sep 14 2010, 18:53) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
PEBKAC?

That's my hypothesis. However, I have found that ming-a-ling malfunctions when running alongside the add-on Menu Editor (BZ Board | AMO). I have checked and rechecked, and the problem is isolated to Menu Editor.

The bug makes everything visible and functioning, apart from the menu items "Add phrase" and "Remove phrase". My guess is that it has to do with the very good looking frames that surround these items in the context- and Tools menus. For some reason Menu Editor doesn't recognise them as being menu items, when you look in the list inside the Settings box. It's a pity, but I need Menu Editor to keep unnecessary menu items from clogging my menus.
"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Lakrits
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Moderator for the Swedish BabelZilla forum section

#16 DustinWehr

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Posted 14 September 2010 - 10:03 PM

QUOTE (Lakrits @ Sep 14 2010, 19:46) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
That's my hypothesis. However, I have found that ming-a-ling malfunctions when running alongside the add-on Menu Editor (BZ Board | AMO). I have checked and rechecked, and the problem is isolated to Menu Editor.

The bug makes everything visible and functioning, apart from the menu items "Add phrase" and "Remove phrase". My guess is that it has to do with the very good looking frames that surround these items in the context- and Tools menus. For some reason Menu Editor doesn't recognise them as being menu items, when you look in the list inside the Settings box. It's a pity, but I need Menu Editor to keep unnecessary menu items from clogging my menus.


I'll test that hypothesis. If removing the frame that surrounds those two options fixes the problem, I'll add a (hopefully) temporary option in the preferences that does that, and possibly switch it on automatically if a user has Menu Editor installed. Also I'll notify the author of Menu Editor.

By the way, I REALLY appreciate hearing about bugs like this one. ming-a-ling needs to be more robust than this.

#17 DustinWehr

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Posted 15 September 2010 - 04:38 AM

I uploaded a version to Babelzilla with a fix for the problem with Menu Editor. When a user first installs ming-a-ling, it'll check whether they have Menu Editor installed and enabled, and if so it'll use context menu items that are compatible. That won't happen if you've installed ming-a-ling before, but I added a new option to the preferences that does the same thing.

#18 markh

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Posted 15 September 2010 - 06:43 AM

QUOTE (DustinWehr @ Sep 15 2010, 04:38) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I uploaded a version to Babelzilla with a fix for the problem with Menu Editor. When a user first installs ming-a-ling, it'll check whether they have Menu Editor installed and enabled, and if so it'll use context menu items that are compatible. That won't happen if you've installed ming-a-ling before, but I added a new option to the preferences that does the same thing.

Wow you really work fast. One thingy though: next time there you upload an update with a new or altered string, please reset the translation status in order to have the WTS send out an update notification. wink.gif
While the bankers all get their bonuses I’ll just get along with what I’ve got


#19 Lakrits

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Posted 15 September 2010 - 02:50 PM

QUOTE (DustinWehr @ Sep 15 2010, 05:38) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>
I uploaded a version to Babelzilla with a fix for the problem with Menu Editor. When a user first installs ming-a-ling, it'll check whether they have Menu Editor installed and enabled, and if so it'll use context menu items that are compatible. That won't happen if you've installed ming-a-ling before, but I added a new option to the preferences that does the same thing.

1) Thank you! That was fast. rockon.gif
2) Don't go working yourself to the ground. Hope I don't give you to much to do.
"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

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#20 Lakrits

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Posted 15 September 2010 - 03:19 PM

I'm starting to feel like the biggest party pooper in history, but...

The fixed ming-a-ling doesn't work, and I can't get into the Settings. Instead I get this messages. It's been back-translated into English, so if it doesn't match the English error texts, that's why:

CODE
XML interpretation error: undefined entity
Address: chrome://mingaling/content/options.xul
Row number 77, Column 4:   <checkbox id="checkbox_no_groupbox_for_Menu_Editor_compat" preference="no groupbox for Menu Editor compat"
---^

"[…] och han talar med bönder på böndernas sätt
men med lärde män på latin." – Erik Axel Karlfeldt

Lakrits
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Moderator for the Swedish BabelZilla forum section


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