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Lingua Translation / Localization Webservice

The Lingua localization (or globalisation) web service resides at http://network.programming-in.net/lingua.asmx it is capable of translating text and or complete URL’s to/from English (en), French (fr), German (de), Italian (it), Portuguese (pt), and Spanish (es). It is free to use, and is easily integrated with ASP.NET, C#, VB.NET, or in fact any .NET language.

Information on how to include a web service in asp.net pages, or windows forms applications can be found in chapter 2 & 17  of Network Programming in .NET (Buy at Amazon UK) (Buy at Amazon US) . If you would like to learn how best to develop and use web services, such as Lingua, it is recommended that you read this book.

Using the ready-made URL translator

The simplest way of using the service is to use the “translateurl” page, which resides at http://network.programming-in.net/articles/translateURL.aspx, using this page, you can provide visitors to your site with alternative languages, such as French, German, Italian, Portuguese, or Spanish. To use it, simply pass two parameters in the query string, (1) URL, for the fully qualified URL to the page you wish to translate, and (2) Lang, for the two-letter language code for the language to be translated to. The source language is assumed to be English. An example could be:

http://network.programming-in.net/articles/translateURL.aspx?URL=http://www.xaml.net&lang=de

The advantage of using this over a using links from Google URL translator is that, (1) your page will not be displayed in a frame, or contain any Google branding. (2) The page is index-able by search engines, so that non-English speaking visitors will be able to find the translated version of your site in search engines. This does not happen with Google-translated sites.

Using the translation webservice from asp.net

More advanced uses of the web service are possible. For instance, as everybody knows, machine translation is far from perfect, so you may wish to have sections of your site professionally translated by native speakers. However, if you have a large database containing product details, it could prove expensive to manually translate a whole database. This is where this system lends itself very well to a hybrid system.

Let us say you have your ASPX pages translated into some foreign language, say French. But a SQL server database containing product descriptions in English, take the Northwind products table for example, (item 20, Rodney’s marmalade), the quantity is described as “30 gift boxes”. A non-English speaking person may not know what “gift boxes” are, and thus, does not buy the product. To correct this, you could create a new column “QuantityPerUnit_FR” in the table, and insert French translations into this column, using the webservice to perform the English to French translation.

Information on how to perform these simple database operations, and how to include a web service in asp.net pages, or windows forms applications can be found in chapter 2 & 17  of Network Programming in .NET (Buy at Amazon UK) (Buy at Amazon US) . If you would like to learn how best to develop and use web services, such as Lingua, it is recommended that you read this book. However for completeness, here is the Lingua.cs, which you could include in your code-behind asp.net page, or windows form app.

NB: Data returned from this webservice is base-64 encoded unicode!
This is in order to avoid problems with malformed XML. In order to convert this back to a readable string call

Encoding.Unicode.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(text64))

using System.Diagnostics;
using System.Xml.Serialization;
using System;
using System.Web.Services.Protocols;
using System.ComponentModel;
using System.Web.Services;
 
 
/// <remarks/>
[System.Diagnostics.DebuggerStepThroughAttribute()]
[System.ComponentModel.DesignerCategoryAttribute("code")]
[System.Web.Services.WebServiceBindingAttribute(Name="LinguaServiceSoap", Namespace="http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/")]
public class LinguaService : System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapHttpClientProtocol {
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public LinguaService() {
        this.Url = "http://www.webtropy.com/lingua.asmx";
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapDocumentMethodAttribute("http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/TranslateURL", RequestNamespace="http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/", ResponseNamespace="http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/", Use=System.Web.Services.Description.SoapBindingUse.Literal, ParameterStyle=System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapParameterStyle.Wrapped)]
    public string TranslateURL(string URL, string fromLanguage, string toLanguage) {
        object[] results = this.Invoke("TranslateURL", new object[] {
                    URL,
                    fromLanguage,
                    toLanguage});
        return ((string)(results[0]));
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public System.IAsyncResult BeginTranslateURL(string URL, string fromLanguage, string toLanguage, System.AsyncCallback callback, object asyncState) {
        return this.BeginInvoke("TranslateURL", new object[] {
                    URL,
                    fromLanguage,
                    toLanguage}, callback, asyncState);
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string EndTranslateURL(System.IAsyncResult asyncResult) {
        object[] results = this.EndInvoke(asyncResult);
        return ((string)(results[0]));
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    [System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapDocumentMethodAttribute("http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/TranslateText", RequestNamespace="http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/", ResponseNamespace="http://www.webtropy.com/linguaService/", Use=System.Web.Services.Description.SoapBindingUse.Literal, ParameterStyle=System.Web.Services.Protocols.SoapParameterStyle.Wrapped)]
    public string TranslateText(string Content, string fromLanguage, string toLanguage) {
        object[] results = this.Invoke("TranslateText", new object[] {
                    Content,
                    fromLanguage,
                    toLanguage});
        return ((string)(results[0]));
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public System.IAsyncResult BeginTranslateText(string Content, string fromLanguage, string toLanguage, System.AsyncCallback callback, object asyncState) {
        return this.BeginInvoke("TranslateText", new object[] {
                    Content,
                    fromLanguage,
                    toLanguage}, callback, asyncState);
    }
   
    /// <remarks/>
    public string EndTranslateText(System.IAsyncResult asyncResult) {
        object[] results = this.EndInvoke(asyncResult);
        return ((string)(results[0]));
    }
}

Other ideas, and uses for the Lingua webservice

During the course of developing this web service, some other possibilities for the uses of this service came to mind. For instance, you could use it to automatically localize resource (.resx) files for applications, or even better, write an application that could scan a third party application using API calls, and replace their text with localized text.

This application is beyond the scope of this article, however, you should look in the Windows API reference section of this site to read more on this possibility.