Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide

BabelFish Web Service

The BabelFish translation service at XMethods (http://www.xmethods.net) is a sample that can be implemented easily with a couple of text fields, a combo box, and a button. With a few lines of ActionScript code, you can put language translation functionality into a Flash movie and into your site. The BabelFish method at http://www.xmethods.net/sd/2001/BabelFishService.wsdl takes two arguments: translationmode and sourcedata.

The translationmode argument is a special code for the two languages used in the translation, as shown in Table 10-2. This data is displayed in a combo box named language_cb.

Table 10-2. Translation modes for the BabelFish remote method

From	To	translationmode
English	French	en_fr
English	German	en_de
English	Italian	en_it
English	Portuguese	en_pt
English	Spanish	en_es
French	English	fr_en
German	English	de_en
Italian	English	it_en
Portuguese	English	pt_en
Russian	English	ru_en
Spanish	English	es_en

The sourcedata argument is the text that you want translated (limited to a string of 150 characters or less). The Flash UI, shown in Figure 10-2, allows the user to type into the from_txt text field, choose a language translation from the combo box, click a button, and get the result in a text field named to_txt.

Figure 10-2. Translation interface

The client-side ActionScript code is shown in Example 10-4, using ...