1) The English version has now less language pairs, as some (Indonesian, Malaysian, etc.) didn’t function correctly. It sometimes happen that translation engines offer free translation promotions to attract potential clients and links, and then discontinue their free support. Also, the Esperanto translation engine didn’t function directly, and redirected to another static page instead. Another translation website (for Afrikaans among other) has been apparently acquired by Google; we hope to add those language pairs from Google as soon as they offer it again.

Language pairs offered by Google have substituted those of Tranexp or Altavista (now Yahoo), due to the obviously better capacity of Google to support text loads; it is currently the most professional option available.

2) The other old plugin versions - German, French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese and Dutch - have been similarly updated: now all languages have more (and better) language pairs to be translated into.

3) Because the Google translation engine now offers all translations from any given language into the other ones, all languages (new and old) appearing on their menu have been added to this widget. Those include Arabic, Bulgarian, Czech, Chinese (traditional and simplified), Danish, Greek, Croatian, Hindi, Korean, Japanese, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, Russian, Swedish and Finnish.

For more language pairs, please consider the fact that their outputs are not so good as with Google or Babelfish (Altavista-Systran). 

Please try the Swedish (svenska) version before asking for new language pairs,  to see if the translation output is good enough for you. Long and specialized texts, for example, might get impossible to read using TranExp…

1. The dictionary English -> Indo-European showed the expected output, but the Indo-European -> English one didn’t. Now (Version 1.1) both dictionaries show both results, but with a different perspective; we still have to solve that database bug, but it’s not a priority.

2. The Indo-European words are now seen with their original characters (Version 1.2) - with macrons, schwas and accents. The future release of the CSV file under the Affero License will contain all those character changes.

For the future, here are the changes we have proposed to María Teresa Batalla, the author of the database and Vice-Chair of the Indo-European Language Association:

1. To release the dictionary in Microsoft Access - it’s now in Excell and SQL, but it would be great for users to have a handy dictionary in their own computers, without having to use our online dictionary.

2. To include with the data (within the Access version) all available Etymological notes about the words, whether from us or from third parties - like the American Heritage Dictionary of the English language.

3. To allow users to participate in the expansion and correction of the dictionary. That is possibly something which has to be addressed directly to the Open Translation Engine developers.

All new releases migh be followed now from the WordPress Plugin Section. That will make updates easier, thanks to the advice system integrated with WordPress plugins.

The Indo-European Language Revival Association.

- We are already using the latest version (0.9.4) of the Open Translation Engine (OTE) free software - a simple but powerful combination of PHP and MySQL.

- There is a display error to be solved; namely, the correct replacement of data (Indo-European phonetic and writing characters) with the appropriate UTF-8 codes.

- Another, not-so-urgent task is to repair the Indo-European terms relationship, which appears to be broken. The English dictionary works, though.

- A future addition will be the possibility to edit the database directly, i.e. to add words for newly registered users, and to delete and correct existing words for those registered users we approve. Until now, this had to be done manually through MySQL…

Our thanks to the OTE guys for their continuing support to the Translation Engine Project.

The Indo-European Language Association

Internet Explorer’s bad output showed the error: there were no initial nor closing List (li)
declared in some vertical language pairs.

The new corrected version is now 1.01, still not stable - call it pre-Alpha, Aleph, or however you like

The Indo-European Language Assoc.

It is based on the simplest WordPress Translator Plugin available out there, and - although more complicated in its design - it is easier to install for most users of WordPress.

We’ll wait to see if can make use of a WordPress.org account to make new releases. Until then, if you use this widget, please subscribe to this blog so that you are always informed about possible security or working bugs.

The Indo-European Language Association.

That’s all for now.