/mt This web API interface is a general purpose machine translation proxy server. It front ends one or many different machine translation services, and presents a common interface to the clients using this interface, so the client can just submit one query to WWL, which proxies the request through to upstream services. It expects the following parameters:

• sl = source language (ISO code)
• tl = target language (ISO code)
• st = source text (Unicode UTF-8 encoding)
• mtengine = machine translation engine to use (to override automatic selection)

It replies with a plain text response with the translated text, or an empty string if the query fails. The proxy server will memcache queries so frequently requested texts are cached in memory (such as in a page that is being reloaded frequently). Unless otherwise noted, the returned text will be Unicode with UTF-8 encoding.

The proxy server currently supports the following machine translation services (more are being added for the June OSS release):

• Google : about 50 languages supported
• Apertium : Spanish, Catalan, French, Portuguese, Galician, Basque, Bretton
• Moses : open source statistical machine translation system
• World Lingo: commercial machine translation service (SaaS)

We are planning to add connectors to several popular enterprise machine translation systems, as soon as we receive documentation from vendors on their SaaS offerings. If you have a machine translation system that you would like to add to WWL, just email brian@worldwidelexicon.org with instructions for querying your web API. The service should be accessible via a standard HTTP GET/POST CGI query and return Unicode compliant (UTF-8 encoded) text in response. You can also extend the mt.py module to create your own custom MT connectors for private or intranet applications.

NOTE: to request a combined recordset containing both human and machine translations, call the /q (get.py) web service instead, as it returns both types of translations depending on query settings. This method is provided specifically for MT queries, and for backward compatibility with the version 1 web API.