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Comment by plus9z | Hacker News Reader

I'm very confused about the purpose of this. If it's just taking advantage of the Translate API so you don't have to use the browser app, I can see the convenience of being able to, say, write a local script without having to munge through API docs and get a Google account and so on. However, I'm confused about it being branded as a language learning tool...

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Check out the zsh git hook described in the docs. Every time you do a commit you can see and hear its message translated to the language that you would like to learn. I find it useful when learning french now since I do dozens of commits every day.

See, my problem with this idea is the inaccuracy of Google Translate's translations. For Romance languages, the results are questionable enough (I'm also learning French at the moment, and anything more than simple sentences can be hit-or-miss); for non-Romance languages, the sentences are just hilariously bad. A sentence as simple as "Hey, cowboy where is your horse?" is translated into Chinese as the slightly mangled 嘿，牛仔是你的马在哪里？ according to the project's README. (To non-readers of Chinese, that 是 should be replaced by a comma.)

(As an aside, I got the strangely reordered and even more ungrammatical "哎牛仔哪里是你的马？" when I tested it myself in-browser. Talk about unreliable.)

This the best you can get with automatic translation. Anyway picking up some IT specific words from my commits descriptions serves me well.

"Hey, cowboy where is your horse?" is translated into Chinese as the slightly mangled 嘿，牛仔是你的马在哪里？

That's partly because the input is bad grammar, casual American. Garbage In, Garbage Out.

Adding appropriate commas doesn't help, afaict.

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