#1179 Provide an OS X Service

[Teppo Turtiainen]

Can you please provide an OS X Service for OmegaT.

OmegaT already provides access to OS X Services but it would be really cool to be able to use OmegaT as an OS X Service.

What I mean is:

1. Select text in any OS X app.
2. Select App menu > Services > Translate with OmegaT.
3. The selected text is replaced with translations from a selected translation memory.

Many apps exist to do this with Google Translate but AFAIK no Mac CAT tool is able to do this.

Thanks for considering this.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

As a Java program it is not possible for OmegaT to provide its own services.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Incidentally what you propose wouldn't work anyway for “translation”; CAT tools do not generate translations, so the best you could do is a lookup in a TM and maybe return something within a certain match percentage. In the general case you will almost never get anything worthwhile from that. If you really wanted to do it you could probably put it together with an Automator workflow wrapping a script that calls Okapi Tikal.

[Teppo Turtiainen]

Lookup and return 100% matches is what I'm looking for. The purpose would be to translate text in proprietary file formats that cannot be imported into any CAT tool.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Here:

1. Download Okapi Apps and unzip to /Applications
2. Place a single TM in ~/TM
3. Unzip the attached Automator workflow to ~/Library/Services
4. Edit the workflow to change the values of -sl and -tl from en-us and ja-jp to your desired source and target languages respectively

[Teppo Turtiainen]

Thanks a lot for this! I was aware of the Okapi Framework but I didn't know it provided such a nice API for accessing TMXs.

[Jean-Christophe Helary]

The service does not have to be provided by OmegaT, hence the fact that OmegaT is a Java application is not really relevant. As you wrote, just looking for matches is not the best way to use OmegaT, but it would be possible to create a service that takes the selected text, saves it to a text (or docx) file, puts it into an already existing OmegaT project (or create one from scratch) and launch OmegaT on it.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Such a service is

1. Not what the user asked for, and
2. By virtue of not being provided by OmegaT is out of scope for an OmegaT RFE

Discussion of such peripheral tools should take place elsewhere, like the user list.