#1466 Allow users to choose Apertium server

[Marc Riera]

Hello,

As an OmegaT user and Apertium developer/user, I have found myself using both together during translation. Apertium is a great piece of free and open-source software that works quite well for some language pairs.

However, the default Apertium plugin packaged in OmegaT is very limited. It always retrieves the translations from https://www.apertium.org, which may be enough for most users, but ignores the fact that anyone can host an Apertium server (like Moses). In addition, while Apertium development is very active, language pair releases have traditionally been slow, which means that pairs on the main server (used by OmegaT) may be out of date by months or even years.

As a rule-based machine translation system, it can be run on any consumer computer without requiring excessive resources, so there is also the possibility of running it locally to prevent text from leaking over the Internet and overcoming NDAs. An external plugin called "Apertium-OmegaT" (http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-OmegaT) was created for this purpose, but again, it depends on released pairs and is technologically obsolete (Java-based Apertium is unmantained). A more promising attempt called "Apertium OmegaT Native" (http://wiki.apertium.org/wiki/Apertium-OmegaT-Native) is under development to allow using nightly builds of the language pairs, but Linux is currently unsupported.

Considering this situation, in an effort to add flexibility to the users, I have modified the built-in Apertium plugin to allow users to define a custom Apertium server URL. It has the following features:

• By default, OmegaT connects to the main Apertium server with its custom API key (no change from now).
• If the checkbox to use a custom server is ticked, OmegaT uses the user-defined server. This can be either an external URL or localhost (for offline use).
• The custom URL and API key can be stored permanently or for the current session only (like other MT plugins allow).

I have sent a pull request on GitHub with the modifications:

Any feedback is welcome, thanks!

Marc Riera

[Marc Riera]

Link to GitHub pull request with the patch: https://github.com/omegat-org/omegat/pull/37

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Implemented in [13778d]. Thanks very much for your contribution.

[Aaron Madlon-Kay]

Released in 5.1.0.