I'm working on a programming project where the code is documented in Japanese (S-JIS). Since most of us here can't read Japanese, we've been trying a lot of things to get it translated. My IDE is CodeWright, which conveniently includes a Perl interpreter for macros. My hope is to be able to highlight a Japanese string and translate it on the fly. I'm attempting to write a macro for it eventually, but for now I'm writing a standalone script: 
#!perl -w
use strict;
use Jcode;

my $DEBUG = 1;

my $text = '';

for(<>)
{
    if($DEBUG)
    {
        my ($code) = getcode($_);
        print "Chunk encoded as: " . $code . "\n";
    }
    
    my $j = Jcode->new($_);
    $text .= $j->utf8 . "\n";
}

print "\nText to send:\n" . $text . "\n" if $DEBUG;

print "\nConnecting to translator... please wait.\n\n";
use WWW::Babelfish;

my $obj = new WWW::Babelfish();
die( "Babelfish server unavailable\n" ) unless defined($obj);

print "\nTranslating... this may take a loooong time.\n\n";
my $english = $obj->translate(
                              source      => 'Japanese',
                              destination => 'English',
                              text        => $text,
                              delimiter   => '\n',
                              );

print "\nTranslation: \n\n";
print $english;
print "\n";

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If it were an ASCII-friendly language like French, or German, I wouldn't have any trouble. But since it's Japanese, I figured I'd have to meddle with the encoding and put it in UTF-8 for Babelfish... I used Jcode to do this, but I'm not sure WWW::Babelfish is robust enough to handle the multi-byte encodings... any pointers would be appreciated...

--isotope
http://www.skylab.org/~isotope/

In reply to Translating Japanese to English with WWW::Babelfish by isotope

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