Re: new webpage: rikai.com

[Mike Fabian <mfabian@example.com>]

"Ulrike Schmidt" <ulrike@example.com> writes:

> Then there was a perl script by Jeffrey Friedl called trans.pl, but its page
> seems to have disappeared from the web. It also seemed to work with/in
> emacs, as far as I understand.

I still have Jeffrey's trans.pl and the emacs lisp file trans.el
which interfaces it to Emacs. If you want, I can mail it to you.

But I haven't used it for years now, because edict.el (currently
maintained by Stephen J. Turnbull) works much better.

Using trans.pl/trans.el it is possible to translate a whole Emacs
region at once. Therefore it is very fast if you want to lookup almost
every single word in a region.

But trans is very bad at parsing the Japanese. It often does the
splitting into words wrong and does no deinflection of verbs at all.
Therefore the results are usually very disappointing and often wrong
and confusing.

If you can read most stuff but only want to look up a few words
here and there, edict.el is much more precise. 

-- 
Mike Fabian   <mfabian@example.com>