Machine Translation

Since version 2.1, Pootle has the ability to use online Machine Translation (MT) Services to give suggestions to translators. This feature has to be enabled by the server administrators.

To enable a certain Machine Translation Service, edit localsettings.py and uncomment the line regarding the desired service within the MT_BACKENDS setting.

Each line is a tuple which has the name of the service and an optional API key. Some services may not require API keys but others do, so take care of getting an API key when necessary.

For now, a couple of online Machine Translation Services are available: Google Translate and Apertium.

Google Translate is widely used and supports lots of translation pairs.

On the other hand, Apertium is best suited for close language pairs, specially for those languages spoken in the Iberian Peninsula that are similar.

If the server administrator has enabled either of those services, an icon will be displayed for each source text (English or alternative source language) next to the Copy button. Clicking the relevant buttons will retrieve translation suggestions from the online services and will mark the current unit as fuzzy for later review.

• The Apertium service provides a JavaScript file that is much bigger than necessary. A Pootle developer contributed a small rewritten version to the Apertium project. This is now fixed.
• The JavaScript file is served in a way that doesn't allow browsers to cache it locally. This causes it to be redownloaded unnecessarily. These issues have been reported to the Apertium developers, and we expect an improvement soon.