Introduction

The Xlat project is an open-source set of Perl tools and modules to facilitate translation. A bit of background might be useful: I'm a technical translator, mostly German to English. But before I ever started that career, I was a programmer, mostly C at the time. Lately I lean towards Perl; CPAN is just so useful.

At any rate, I tend to want to write tools to help me work. Until recently, I hadn't been organized enough to publish any of my scripts, and so every time I had a script need, I'd start from scratch. Now that I've started publishing on CPAN, I'm no longer losing quite so much ground.

This blog is where I organize my thoughts and plans, and announce new tools in the toolkit. If you're reading it, great! I would appreciate any and all feedback; as I'm sure you know, handling natural language is very hard indeed. My philosophy is to release early and raw, then iterate. That means that for any given project, these tools may well fail in egregious ways (character encodings are always a great way to get that to happen). Caveat emptor - a full refund is always available. (A little open-source joke.)

If you've got comments, you know what to do. I'd appreciate any feedback.