[Request] Support for Revirada

[Nico7as]

Hi,

I wish Dialect would support Apertium, a FOSS translation engine used for some languages.

Apertium is the engine used by Revirada, the main translator for the Occitan language.

Occitan is a regional language of the south or France. Its many dialects cover a third of the french territory.

In the schools where we teach it we try to promote FOSS and use the software in occitan whenever possible.

Online solutions exist, but I'd like my schoolchildren to use simple standalone software whenever possible.

Here are some ressources I could gather :

https://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Main_Page
https://www.apertium.org/index.oci.html#?dir=fra-oci&q=

A guide to use the API of Revirada, the reference online occitan translator, where Aperium is mentioned as an engine.
https://revirada.eu/api_info

I know some people with coding skills, and a interest in this language en particular.
Il try to get him on board with this request.

Nicolas

[rafaelmardojai]

Hello, thanks for the interest on Dialect,

Adding support for the Revirada API should be pretty trivial. We already have support for providers requiring api keys.

About Apertium itself, we're planning to add offline translation support in the near future, and Apertium could be one of the offline providers. Right now Dialect is internally designed for online providers, but this PR (#357) that should be merged soon will make our internal api for providers more generic. Next thing will be to implement an internal api for offline providers that need to download models, so they can have a common user interface.

[jeblad]

Apertium is used by some local providers, but in general it would be better to implement support for Apertium as such. This translation engine is especially good when it comes to languages that can be supported by shallow engines. Examples are among other Norwegian Bokmål and Nynorsk. Those two variants of Norwegian are very close, yet Norwegian Nynorsk isn't supported by most engines. Apertium is able to translate fairly well among those two variants.

Note also this comment from the closed #119. In particular “The API for the web front at the home page is Apertium-apy and the code is at Github. This is the same code that is used by front ends like apertium-html-tools and Mediawiki Content Translation.”

Perhaps this issue should be renamed “Support for Revirada” and #119 be reopened.