apertium VS obsidian-releases

This is very cool, looking forward to it! I've been doing the same thing with Spanish Wikipedia articles for a while, using a few lines of Bash + Regex. I was using Apertium for it. https://apertium.org/ It's definitely worse than most ML-based solutions, but it works reliably and fast; you can run it entirely offline. With Spanish translations, the main problem I was facing is lack of vocabulary, so I created https://github.com/phil294/apertium-eng-spa-wiktionary which about doubles the amount of recognized words, albeit with wonky grammar.

I used to keep track of the state of machine translation some years back.

I think the way you measure the success of an automated translation is edit distance, i.e. how many manual edits you need to make to a translated text before you reach some acceptable state. I suppose it's somewhat subjective, but it is possible to construct a benchmark and allow for multiple correct results.

The best resources I knew back then were:

VISL's CG-3 self-reported a competitively low edit distance compared to Google Translate: https://visl.sdu.dk/constraint_grammar.html -- the abstraction unfortunately requires a rather deep knowledge of any one particular language's grammar. It is a convincing argument that in order to beat Google Translate, you want less fuzzy machine learning and more structural analysis. But you also need a PhD in computational linguistics and deep knowledge of each language.

Apertium has an open-source pipeline: https://apertium.org/ -- seems to be much more like an open-source approach with a quality similar to Google Translate (although I don't know if it's better or worse; probably slightly worse in most cases, and with a slightly lower coverage).

For context, I have been contributing CV Creole data to Unicode's CLDR and MediaWiki for a number of years now, but both are mostly manual work. I once considered setting up an Apertium language pair between CV Creole and Portuguese, given the grammatical similarities, but never got around to it.

Lingva is awesome. Also don't forget to check out LibreTranslate and Apertium. They are open source. Apertium can even translate web pages (you need to enter the URL).

#!/bin/bash set -x mkdir -p apertium-src && \ mkdir -p $MTDIR cd apertium-src && \ wget http://ftp.tsukuba.wide.ad.jp/software/gcc/releases/gcc-8.5.0/gcc-8.5.0.tar.gz -O - \ | gzip -dc \ | tar -xf - && \ cd gcc-8.5.0 && \ ./configure --prefix=$MTDIR --disable-multilib && \ make -j $(nproc) && \ make install && \ cd .. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ wget https://github.com/unicode-org/icu/releases/download/release-69-1/icu4c-69_1-src.tgz -O - \ | gzip -dc \ | tar -xf - \ && cd icu/source \ && CC=gcc CXX=g++ ./configure --prefix=$MTDIR \ && CC=gcc CXX=g++ make -j $(nproc) \ && CC=gcc CXX=g++ make install \ && cd ../.. \ || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ svn checkout http://beta.visl.sdu.dk/svn/visl/tools/vislcg3/trunk vislcg3 && \ cd vislcg3 && ./get-boost.sh \ && ./cmake.sh -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=$MTDIR \ -DICU_INCLUDE_DIR=$MTDIR/include \ -DICU_LIBRARY=$MTDIR/lib/libicuuc.so \ -DICU_IO_LIBRARY=$MTDIR/lib/libicuio.so \ -DICU_I18N_LIBRARY=$MTDIR/lib/libicui18n.so \ && make -j$(nproc) && \ make install && cd .. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ git clone https://github.com/apertium/lttoolbox && \ cd lttoolbox && ./autogen.sh --prefix=$MTDIR && make -j $(nproc) && make install && cd ../.. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium && \ cd apertium && ./autogen.sh --prefix=$MTDIR && make -j $(nproc) && make install && cd ../.. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium-lex-tools && \ cd apertium-lex-tools && ./autogen.sh --prefix=$MTDIR && make -j $(nproc) && make install && cd ../.. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium-tha && \ cd apertium-tha && ./autogen.sh --prefix=$MTDIR && make && make install && cd ../.. || exit 1 cd apertium-src && \ git clone https://github.com/apertium/apertium-tha-eng && \ cd apertium-tha-eng && ./autogen.sh --prefix=$MTDIR && make && make install && cd .. && \ cd .. || exit 1

The closest editor that follows our first principle is Obsidian editor:

The solution was already installed on both my computer and my phone: Obsidian.

> why does open source need to "win"

Open source does not need to win.

But your ability to be in control of your computer needs to be preserved. A proprietary fridge cannot control your diet, while a proprietary App Store can control what software you install on YOUR phone (unless you live in EU, hello DMA!). The tail wags the dog, so to speak. Proprietary software has also been shown to break user workflows or remove functions in an update while leaving users with no choice whatsoever.

One alternative to having open source win is to ensure software must come with a robust warranty and other assurances you expect from the things you buy. EU's CRA will make software vulnerabilities in WiFi routers covered by warranty, for example.

You can also ensure robust and interoperable data storage options. For example, https://obsidian.md/ stores all notes in Markdown, not holding the data hostage in case users will not like how future versions will work. GDPR actually has a provision for data portability (Art. 20), but it does not seem to have a requisite effect on the industry yet.

And until the above issues are solved, open source remains the best way to ensure that a software tail cannot wag your computer dog.

[2] https://obsidian.md/

So I've had my fair share of personal websites and blogs. I have built them on stacks ranging from the most basic HTML and CSS, to hosted frameworks like Wordpress and Laravel, to the more modern single page applications built in Vue and React. For a simple content blog I think you can't go wrong with a Static Site Generator though. These days I am almost exclusively writing everything in Obsidian. Which is great because its all in standard markdown format. This allows for a really neat and easy content publishing workflow.

Consider making an Obsidian[^1] plugin, or writing to Obsidian-compatible Markdown files :)

[^1]: https://obsidian.md/

Obsidian is a writing application created to allow for offline / private note taking in markdown format, in an interface that looks a lot like our regular programming IDE. It is very flexible, with a good collection of community plugins that you can use to customize Obsidian to your heart contents.

Obsidian support via our Obsidian Plugin

Thank you!

In the beginning, I used kognise'z water.css [1], so most of the smart decisions (background/text color, margins, line spacing I think) probably come from there. Since then it's been some amount of little adjustments. The font is by Jean François Porchez, called Le Monde Livre Classic [2].

I draft in Obsidian [3] and build the site with a couple python scripts and KaTeX.

[1] https://watercss.kognise.dev/

[2] https://typofonderie.com/fr/fonts/le-monde-livre-classic

[3] https://obsidian.md/