The translator plug-in translates Titles, Captions and Keywords into a
target language.
Translating titles, captions and keywords is arduous and tedious, a
necessary evil. I do not know of any photographer who takes fun in it!
However, when for example, delivering to stock agencies supplying titles,
captions and keywords in English is a requirement. And if selling is your
business, good meta data makes the difference!
Of course there are many more use cases where translation of these meta
data is required.
Further you have the ability to correct translations before they are
applied. Lastly, all translations are cached locally, so that you do not
have to correct the same translations over and over again.
Since the plug-in works with Google translate any combination of
languages supported by Google is also supported by the plugin, see supported languages.
For many stock agencies titles, captions and keywords in English is a
requirement. When English is not your native language you'll have to
translated these.
The problem solved is the arduous and tedious work of translating
your titles, captions and keywords.
Real live example: a Dutch professional photographer delivering to a stock
agency had to supply his titles, captions and keywords also in English. He
asked me if it was possible to create a plug-in to support this step in his
workflow. Advantages
Integrated workflow inside Lightroom
Translation happens inside the plug-in, no copy and paste
Translations are automatically written to the titles, captions and
keywords
Multiple photos can be processed in one run.
Quality improvement: translation consistency, the same translations is
used everywhere
Previous translations are cached
Improved translations, because Google did not got the right
translation, are used and cached for the future use.
You create your own translation dictionary.
You can choose whether to store the translated keyword as synonym or
new keyword
The plug-in retrieves all titles, captions and keywords of all
selected images.
These words and phrases are send to the translation web service.
For now, this is the standard Google translate, like
https://translate.google.com.
The translation result is presented in a pop-up screen for inspection
and/or correction
Here you can optionally improve the translations.
No correction means simply pressing "Ok"
The translation are
Applied to the selected images
Are cached for later use.
Be aware max lengths
Texts longer than 250 characters are split by Google.
For titles you have to be aware of this.
Caption sentences are split based on the "Split long sentences
characters". For more info, see the "Configuration screen" paragraph below
Translation dialog
Below you see an example of the translation pop-up of step three above.
The translations dialog contains three sections:
Left section: toggles for (de-) selecting
translations of all titles or captions or keywords
Only the selected ones will be added to the images.
Middle section: original words/phrases and their
translations
Right section: correlation between the translation
and it's source: title, caption or keyword.
Check-box: you can enable or disable individual translations
Grayed out: no found in that source
Select all / Deselect all buttons
Default all titles, captions and keywords will be processed.
With "Deselect all" no translation will be written to the photos for
titles, captions or keywords.
Original / Translation
In the middle section the original titles, captions and keywords and
their translations are listed. You can improve the translation.
Every improvement will be used and stored in the local cache, so the next
time this keyword is found your correction will be used.
Titles, captions, keywords
The check-boxes display where the translation was found and where it will
be stored. For example, the translation "blue" was both found both as a
caption and as a keyword. When you click the "Ok" button, "blue" will be
added to the caption and the keywords.
However, you can deselect individual translation from being applied.
If a check-box is greyed out this means that either the translation was
not found in that source, title, caption or keyword, or that in the
Plug-in Manager you selected not to process that source.
From cache
This check-box is only an indicator where the translation came from. When
checked, the translation was found in the local cache, when unchecked the
translation came from the translation service.
In the "Configuration" tab of the Plug-in manager you can set the default
for the options of the plug-in.
Translation service info
The top three options concern the translation web service used.
This version only supports the free translation service of Google
Translation.
Language to translate from / to should be set to your liking.
The available languages and their abbreviations can be found here.
Titles, captions and the separator
When translating titles or captions, the translation is concatenated to
the original title or caption and separated by a "separator".
You can determine which separator to use.
In the example below the Dutch title "Paard in de wei" and the English
translation "Horse in the paddock" will result in the title below.
Paard in de wei ; Horse in the paddock
Titles
Translate
when checked titles will be translated, when uncheck the titles are
ignored.
Excluding titles that contain the separator
When checked any title containing the separator character will be
skipped.
By default you want to have this option checked because when the plug-in
is run for a second time, you don't want the translation for "Paard in
de wei ; Horse in the paddock".
Concatenation string
the character(s) used to concatenate / add the translation to the
original title or caption.
In the example above we used:
<space><separator><space>, see example above.
Replace the original title by the translation
This will overwrite the original title with the translated title.
Handle with care!
Captions
Split long sentences characters.
Because of the Google Translate behavior of splitting long sentences at
256 characters, long sentences need to be split in smaller parts.
The "Split long sentences characters" contains all characters that split
a line in parts. By default the dot character is
used. However you could use both the dot and comma character or any
other character.
Of course splitting a long sentences in smaller parts might have affect
on the translation of the whole sentence.
see the title paragraph above for the explanation of the other
options.
Keywords
Translate
Whether keywords should be translated or not
Exclude keywords with synonyms
When checked all keywords that contain synonyms will not be skipped for
translation
Exclude translated keywords
When checked all keywords which have synonyms will be skipped from
translation
Exclude translated keywords
See explanation below
Add translation as synonym
The translation will be added to the original keyword as a synonym.
So the "blue" will be added as synonym to the "blauw" keyword
Add translation as new keyword
A new keyword will be created from the translation. This new keyword has
the same parent as the original keyword.
If the keyword "blauw" is a child of "color", the new "bleu" keyword
will also be created inside "colors".
Exclude translated keywords
Let's use the example above. The plug-in translates the "blauw" keyword
to "blue". When the user clicks "Ok" in the dialog, the plug-in will
create a new keyword called "blue" and add that keyword to the photo. So
now the photo has both the "blauw" and the "blue" keyword.
When the plug-in runs again, it will find two keywords on this photo:
"blauw" and "blue".
Of course the last one is a translated keyword and should not be
translated again.
In the background the plug-in will add all translations to a cache of
words that have been translated.
Now when the plug-in runs again, it will skip all keywords found in this
cache. So only "blauw" will be picked for translation.
General
Use translation from cache
When checked, before requesting the translation from the translation
service, all words or phrases translated previous are skipped from the
request. They are retrieved from the cache.
Reason why using the cache
The main reasons why the plug-in uses a caches are:
There will always be translations that need improvement or alteration.
It would be a bad thing to have to correct these translations over and
over again.
Using the cache will give you more consistency in the used
translations, because each time the same translation is used.
Much higher performance, because no or less calls need to be made to
the translation web service.
When contacting the free Google translation service to often, the
might think you are a bot and will block you for some time.
This is also the reason we implemented a little sleeping time between
calls.
Each request to the Google translation web service can have at max
5000 characters. If the requested translations require more characters,
the web services is called multiple time.
