Thanks.

WHATS THE SYNTAX OF THE FUNCTION??

THE STRUCTURE OF THE WEB PAGE STILL THE SAME??

Someone asked about this in the excel programming NG about six weeks ago. Here is my reply to that post.

However, it looks like Altavista has changed their page structure a bit since then. Here’s an updated version, which utilizes the XMLHTTP object and should be quite a bit faster than Automating IE:

Public Enum TranslateLanguages
   Eng_Fren = 1
   Eng_Ger = 2
   Eng_Ita = 3
   Eng_Port = 4
   Eng_Span = 5
   Fren_Eng = 6
   Fren_Ger = 7
   Ger_Eng = 8
   Ger_Fren = 9
   Ita_Eng = 10
   Port_Eng = 11
   Span_Eng = 12
End Enum

Public Function gsTranslateText(rsTextToTranslate, _
rMode As TranslateLanguages) As String
   Dim xml As XMLHTTP40
   Dim abytPostData() As Byte
   Dim sMode As String
   Dim sResponse As String
   Dim nStartPos As Integer
   Dim nEndPos As Integer

   Select Case rMode
      Case Eng_Fren
         sMode = “en_fr”
      Case Eng_Ger
         sMode = “en_de”
      Case Eng_Ita
         sMode = “en_it”
      Case Eng_Port
         sMode = “en_pt”
      Case Eng_Span
         sMode = “en_es”
      Case Fren_Eng
         sMode = “fr_en”
      Case Fren_Ger
         sMode = “fr_de”
      Case Ger_Eng
         sMode = “de_en”
      Case Ger_Fren
         sMode = “de_fr”
      Case Ita_Eng
         sMode = “it_en”
      Case Port_Eng
         sMode = “pt_en”
      Case Span_Eng
         sMode = “es_en”
   End Select

   abytPostData = StrConv(“doit=done&intl=1? _
    & “&tt=urltext&lp=” & sMode & “&urltext=” _
    & rsTextToTranslate, vbFromUnicode)

   Set xml = New XMLHTTP40
   With xml
      .Open “POST”, _
       “http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/tr”
      .setRequestHeader “Content-Type”, _
       “application/x-www-form-urlencoded”
      .send abytPostData
      sResponse = .responseText
   End With
   
   ’/ find translation
   nStartPos = InStr(1, sResponse, “name=”"q”"”, vbTextCompare)
   If nStartPos Then
      nStartPos = nStartPos + 16
      nEndPos = InStr(nStartPos, sResponse, _
       “”"”, vbTextCompare) – 1
      If nEndPos >= nStartPos Then gsTranslateText = _
       Mid$(sResponse, nStartPos, nEndPos – _
       nStartPos + 1)
   End If

   Set xml = Nothing
End Function

You should be able to utilize the XMLHTTP object with the Systran URL in your example if you’d like to test it out. [note: the above code requires a reference to the Microsoft XML v4.0 library]

Regarding machine translation, I’ve notice some sites are more accurate than others when dealing with specific languages, so I am wondering which part of your code I would need to change to a different site.

For example, this is a specialist translation site for English and Japanese.

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/cgi-bin/cgiwrap/jwb/wwwjdic?9T

Regarding legality, I’m no expert either, but I figure these translation sites are free to use anyway, so theoretically there shouldn’t be any problem. (On the other hand, some sites do try to push their translation software so they might get a little upset)