Faster translating

One painful thing about translating between two languages is that you usually have to specify a direction. That’s bollocks. Life’s already too complicated to worry about whether you’re translating from English to Spanish or the other way around.

In that spirit I created the str (“Super/Simple/Synchronous TRanslation”) YubNub command. You specify, in any order, 2-letter codes for the two languages you want to translate between and the text you want to translate. str avoids the direction decision by doing both at once, each one presented in an individual vertical frame. This is not only much faster in practice, it’s more unconscious and habit-friendly.

You can try it right here! (en stands for ENglish, es for ESpañol=Spanish)

You can see more instructions and the 2-letter codes at str’s man page.

YubNub, for the uninitiated, is “the ”p">(social) command line for the web" — a social webapp to use (and create!) handy commands that search your favorite websites and do a whole nother bunch of wonderful things. The simplest way to use it is from their homepage but there are a ton of ways to install it. Installing it in the location bar, as I once explained here, is in my opinion one of the coolest.