Google Hacks 2Nd Edition [Electronic resources] نسخه متنی

Hack 20. Use Google Tools for Translators

Create a customized search form for language
translation .

If you do a lot of the same kind of research every day, you might find that a customized search
form makes your job easier. If you spend enough time on it, you may
find that it's elaborate enough that other people
may find it useful as well.

WWW Search Interfaces for Translators
(http://www.multilingual.ch/search_interfaces)
offers four amazing tools for finding material of use to translators.
Created by Tanya Harvey Ciampi from Switzerland, the
tools are available in AltaVista and Google flavors. A user-defined
query term is combined with a set of specific search criteria to
narrow down the search to yield highly relevant results.

The first tool, shown in Figure 1-33, finds
glossaries. The pull-down menu finds synonyms of the word
"glossary" in various parts of a
search result (title, URL, or anywhere). For example, imagine having
to seek out numerous specialized computer dictionaries before finding
one containing a definition of the term
"firewall." This glossary search
tool spares you the work by setting a clear condition:
"Find a glossary that contains my
term!"

If you're getting too many results for the glossary
word you searched for, try searching for it in the title of the
results instead, for example, intitle:firewall rather than
firewall.

The second tool, shown in Figure 1-34, finds
"parallel texts,"
identical pages in two or more languages, useful for multilingual
terminology research.

Finding pages in two or more languages is not easy; one of the few
places to do it easily is with Canadian government pages, which are
available in French and English. This tool provides several different
search combinations between SL (source language) and TL (target
language).

The first set of searches defaults to Google, though you can search
AltaVista instead, if you prefer. It provides several language sets
(English-German, English-Spanish, English-French, etc.) and gives you
options for searching in each one (SL in URL, link to TL, page in TL
country, etc.).

The second set of searches also offers several language sets and
several ways to search them (three different ways to search for the
source language in the URL, keyword on the page in the target
language, etc.). In some cases, this tool also lets you specify the
country for the target language (for example, French could be a
target language in Canada, France, or Switzerland).

The third tool, shown in Figure 1-35, finds
variations on the word
"abbreviations" in the title or URL
of a search result to find lists of abbreviations.

A fourth tool (Figure 1-36) searches for
idioms (I can never
quite remember: is it "feed a cold, starve a
fever" or "feed a fever, starve a
cold"?), proverbs, and slang.

These search tools are available in several languages and do a lot of
work for translators; in fact, they pull out so much information that
you might think they'd require the Google API. But
they don't; the query is generated on the client
side and then passed to Google.

It's accomplished quite elegantly. First, take a
look at the source code for the form and see if you notice anything.
Here's a hint: pay attention to the form element
names. Notice that this hack integrates search synonyms without
having to use the Google API or any kind of CGI.
Everything's done via the form.

<!-- Initializing the form and opening a Google search
in a new window -->
<form method="GET" target="_blank"
action="http://www.google.com/search">
<!-- Taking the keyword search specified by the user -->
<input type="text" name="q" size="12">
<select name="q" size="1">
<!-- This is the cool stuff. These options provide several
different modifiers designed to catch glossaries
in Google. -->
<option selected value="intitle:dictionary OR intitle:glossary
OR intitle:lexicon OR intitle:definitions">
synonyms of "glossary" in TITLE - 1</option>
<option value="intitle:terminology OR intitle:vocabulary
OR intitle:definition OR intitle:jargon">
synonyms of "glossary" in TITLE - 2</option>
<option value="inurl:dictionary OR inurl:glossary OR inurl:lexicon
OR inurl:definitions">
synonyms of "glossary" in URL - 1</option>
<option value="inurl:terminology OR inurl:vocabulary
OR inurl:definition
OR inurl:jargon">synonyms of "glossary" in URL - 2</option>
<option value="inurl:dict OR inurl:gloss OR inurl:glos
OR inurl:dic">
abbreviations for "glossary" in URL</option>
<option value="dictionary OR glossary OR lexicon
OR definitions">synonyms of "glossary" ANYWHERE</option>
</select>
<!-- Ending the submission form. -->
<input type="submit" value="Find">
<input type="reset" value="Reset" name="B2">
</form>

The magic at work here is to be found in the following two lines:

<input type="text" name="q" size="12">
<select name="q" size="1">

Notice that both the query text field and glossary pop-up menu are
named the same thing: name="q". When the form is
submitted to Google, the values of both fields are effectively
combined and treated as one query. So entering a query of
dentistry and selecting synonyms of
"glossary" in TITLE - 1 from the pop-up menu result in a
combined Google query of:

dentistry intitle:dictionary OR intitle:glossary OR intitle:lexicon OR intitle:definitions

1.32.1. Hacking the Hack

This hack uses customized Google forms as an interface for
translators, but you could use this idea for just about anything. Do
you need to find legal statutes? Financial materials? Information
from a particular vertical market? Anything that has its own
specialized vocabulary that you can add to a
form can be channeled into a hack like this. What kind of interface
would you design?