Options for translating languages within perl scripts

[Eileen Pinto]

Hi,

I've been tasked with massaging a large batch of French-language MARC records from a vendor.  Aside from the usual MARC field manipulation/cleanup we usually do with perl, I've been asked to run the 520 field through a translation routine/API, etc. to convert (possibly crudely) from French to English.  I thought that Babelfish or http://api.yandex.com/translate/doc/dg/reference/translate.xml might be options, but Babelfish appears to be dead, and when I clicked to get the required key for the yandex API, the link led to a dead end.  

Is anyone incorporating POST queries or other methods to translate fields in MARC records?  I'd appreciate any leads or pointers.

Thanks in advance,

Eileen Pinto

Library Systems Office

University of California, Berkeley

Berkeley, CA  94720-6000

[Kool,Wouter]

Perhaps theWWW::Babelfish module helps. It seems to support connecting to the Google and Yahoo services as well. Haven't tried it but seems interesting:
http://search.cpan.org/~durist/WWW-Babelfish-0.16/Babelfish.pm

Wouter

[David Cook]

Personally, I wouldn't recommend automatic translations, since they're very prone to errors.

However, as a French/English speaker, I'd suggest Reverso ( http://localize.reverso.net/Default.aspx?lang=en). I haven't used their API, but it's an excellent service. Its translation engine is the best I've seen.

What sort of fields are you translating?