In the course of dealing with some spanish language account requests, I got interested in having some movement alternative to babelfish and google translate.

I spent a couple of days building my own translation system, but eventually decided that 50+ years of statistical machine translation has been good for something, and I shouldn’t recreate it.

Fortunately, there is a well-developed suite of open-source machine translation tools available now, Apertium.

It was relatively straight-forward to get this all running on my laptop, and with a little python and javascript wrapped around it, I made a bookmarklet that I am pretty happy with.

Unfortunately, nest is crashing right now, and I can’t show off just how amazing it is.

Here is what the process might look like: