Re: [Evolution-hackers] language identification and translation plugin

[Not Zed <notzed ximian com>]

Hi Francis,

Interesting idea.

Although you could add a language translation button to the main display, it will be a significant amount of work, as the text display formatter is one of the more complex in the codebase.  I'm not sure you want the overhead for viewing all messages either.

Probably for a start I just recommend adding a main or context menu item to perform any work, and then do the language identifcation on the fly once it is invoked.  You can't add new headers to mails (for starters, there is physically no way to do this with the mail abstraction api and specifically with IMAP at all), although you can add things called 'tags' to messages; you could use this to cache language identification information, if such caching were to be deemed necessary.

The language identification and message reconstruction phases are the bulk of the work, I think for starters if there is a way to invoke it and test it, it should be sufficient.  Before you get bogged down in details like a really fancy, interactive user interface for it.

Regards,
 Michael

On Tue, 2004-12-07 at 12:39 +0000, Francis Tyers wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I'm interested in writing a plugin that automatically identifies the
> language of incoming emails and allows people to translate them using a
> range of online translation mechanisms.
>
> I was asking on #evolution about eplugin and what the best way would be
> to integrate it into the evolution mail interface. I was advised to
> refer my question to this list...
>
> I had an idea of adding a header to the email when it comes in (i.e.
> X-Language-Identified or similar) and then having a button in the top
> right hand corner of the header display (not sure what this is called in
> evolution lingo ;) to open up the available translation options dialog.
>
> Does this sound feasible? Or would a different method be more
> appropriate? 
>
> Any input would be gratefully received,
>
> Francis Tyers
>
> PS. I hang out on #evolution as "spectre"
>
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--

Michael Zucchi <notzed ximian com> "Ride, Work, Sleep. Beer." Novell's Evolution and Free Software Developer