Back in 2003, when I was in graduate school getting an MBA in Information Technology, I wrote a Chinese to English translation web app using LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, PHP, MySQL). It worked very well, but I never made it public because I had concerns about its security and efficiency.
I tinkered with it from time to time, mostly just adding words and phrases to the database. Then I completely gave up soon after Google released their own Chinese to English translation with Google Translate in 2007. After all, there’s no point in developing an app if I can’t do better than what’s already out there.
Recently, I dug up the old code and cleaned it up, thinking I might revive the project. But then, I remembered why I abandoned the project in the first place, and saw that there’s no point in reviving it again. So… I’m just going to release the code in case anyone is interested in one approach to language translation. You can use this approach to translate any language, but it probably works best with Asian languages where one character generally equals one word.
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