Translator Evaluator

Now that we have completed all our translators, we can take stock and review our list. Included with the code for this book is a simple utility called Translator Evaluator. Its purpose is to enable you to experiment with different translators and compare their support, performance, and accuracy. Start TRanslatorEvaluator. exe, enter a "from" language and a "to" language, and click the "Show Support For Languages" button (see Figure 9.11).

Figure 9.11. Translator Evaluator"Show Support For Languages"

This tells you which translators support this language pair. Enter some text in the "Translation text" text box and click the Translate button. Figure 9.12 shows the result.

Figure 9.12. Translator Evaluator Comparing Translation Performance and Accuracy

The Duration shown is the duration for a translation from the "from" language to the "to" language only; it does not include the translation back to the original "from" language. From the duration, you can infer the relative performance of the different translators. You should run your tests several times and take a mean duration because many factors affect performance. Based on your results, you should be able to determine which translators to list first in your translatorCollection and which to list later, to be used only if the first translators fail.

The "translation" column shows the translated text. Even from this example, you can see that there are differences between how the different translators translate text.

The "TRanslation Back" column shows the translation of the translated text back to its original language. You can use this to gauge the accuracy of the translation process. Remember, it is only an indicationit doesn't necessarily follow that if there are differences, the translation is wrong.