Hey, everyone, I have something that isn't exactly a programming question, but it very well could turn into one.

There's this website, http://www.spanishdict.com that is a bilingual English/Spanish dictionary, it's extremely useful. The cool thing about it is that it gets its data from a couple of other online dictionaries and puts them in one page of search results.

I guess they get to do that in exchange for providing a link to the real dictionaries and also a link to their Amazon sales pages in the results. At least, I'm pretty sure that's how they do it, but that's not really the point of this question.

The fact of the matter is, I would like to add something similar to the site I'm developing, which is a blog about learning Spanish. If I can swing a similar deal with a couple of dicitonary companies, that would be awesome.

The problem is that I can't tell just from looking at it how it works. My guess is that someone painstakingly copied the data from all these dictionaries and created individual pages for each entry.

I guess that because typing in a url for the word that you want to look up (http://www.spanishdict.com/translate/run for "run") works the same as using the search bar. Can anyone tell me if that's what's going on?

The other thing is, my site is just a wordpress blog that uses the static page feature for the informational content. Could I really reproduce 200,000 seperate pages like this, all inside wordpress? Is that even feasible? What would you guys recommend instead if not?

The other thing is, I'm running out of a Bluehost account, which has been working good so far, but I think something of this scale might require a little more oomph. Right?

Anyway, thanks a lot, I really appreciate any help.

do you mean Translation?

Yeah, actually. Sorry haha

Language Translation Using PHP

This post has been edited by noorahmad: 10 Jun, 2009 - 11:50 PM

Lol, thank you but that's not quite what I meant...

I'm talking about the bar on the top of the page, where it has a blank the says "Enter a Spanish or English word" with the green button that says "Translate Word"

It takes you to a whole list of search results.

Actually, I'm sorry I said it was translation, basically my question would be, "How do I make a dictionary type site?"

Well, you can do it with a huge SQL database of words and their meanings. I doubt there's actually separate pages for each word, although I'm not sure exactly why the url looks like it does. The database has a spanish word, and then the english text to display when someone looks a word up. You just query the data and display the results. That's my guess, I haven't actually worked on or looked at the workings of any dictionary sites.

you need a database and a language script such as ASP, ASP.Net PHP etc...!

Thanks a lot guys!!

Do you know how much it would cost for me to hire a project like this out on Elance, or if my bluehost professional account will have the juice?

hello gents,

I think it is very clever to use IFRAM like the below from (http://www.spanishdict.com). The idea is just to pass your request (Orginal Text) to an external URL (google.com/translate) with a accurate request data (params), then you will recieve the needed translation, which will be presented at your page using IFRAM, see below for more details.

<iframe frameborder="0" scrolling="yes" class="iframe" name="google_translation" id="google_translation" src="http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=es|en&text=Dear Sir, get laid tonight"></iframe>


there is no need for such a huge DB while you can request needed translation (the right way).

Thanks
Konna

Assuming you are asking if it will be able to accomplish this, the answer is definately yes. It gives you everything you would need and more (PHP, ASP, RubyonRails, MySQL, PGSQL, Python, and the list goes on). The space shouldn't be an issue either (as I believe they are still holding their unlimited disk space) all you may need to do is open a ticket to get them to add you to the unlimited bin.

Now, if you are looking to hire someone to do this for you, that will take abit of money, they will need to create the interface for the database and then fill the database with a few languages worth or words not to mention getting the translation tables set up correctly. You are probably looking at a couple of thousand dollars...