We've all used Google Translate - it's become essential today with the intertwining of the Internet and the globalization of finance, corporate governance, and trade. Enterprises of every size often compete in the global economy by collaborate with domestic or foreign partners. To provide users of software in a global market with texts in their own language, translations are required.
Enterprises that build using SAPUI5 can utilize the i18n framework in SAPUI5 to extract "hard-coded" strings in their app and maintain them in a single file. But what about texts that aren't hard-coded - what about transactional data that's dynamically loaded from a back-end?
This is where the SAP API Business Hub comes in. There are many APIs/REST APIs that customers can leverage from here, including the SAP Leonardo Machine Learning Services. For our SAP Translate app, we're gong to leverage the SAP Translation Hub, which is a contributing entity for SAP Leonardo Machine Learning.
So, how does this work?
SAP Translation Hub enables you to translate texts by using a range of Web services to access records in a multilingual database and by using machine translation.
SAP Translation Hub is an SAP Cloud Platform service that is available in the Neo environment. At the core of SAP Translation Hub are multilingual texts from SAP applications that are stored in an SAP HANA database called the multilingual text repository (MLTR).
SAP Translation Hub comprises a set of Web services that let you access the multilingual texts in the database and a connection to an SAP-internal machine translation solution based on the Moses open source toolkit (SAP machine translation).
You can use the Web services to translate texts, for example, in SAP Cloud for Customer (or ERP, etc.,), your own translation user interface, or through a translation tool that you create in an integrated development environment (IDE). For our SAP Translate app, we supply the texts that need translating (see the red arrow in the above diagram).
The easiest way to try out the SAP Translation Hub services is to use
SAP API Business Hub. You can view the request and response models and, if you log on, try out the services from one central console.
Feel free to test my SAP Translate app
here.
Great! Where do I start to build my SAP Translate app?
This tutorial is comprised of three exercises (as seen below). These are exercises that I've created for the upcoming
SAP Cloud Platform Technical Academy. They walk you through every step. I've tried to leverage as many services that are offered through the SAP Cloud Platform (including
SAP BUILD,
SAP Web IDE,
SAP API Business Hub,
SAPUI5, and the
Portal service). Of course, there are many different ways to build this, but here is one way that touches many entities of the platform.
Exercise #1: Create your UI using SAP BUILD
Exercise #2: Add Logic to your UI in SAP Web IDE
Exercise #3: Create/Deploy to the SAP Fiori Launchpad
What do I need to build my own SAP Translate?
If you don’t already have SAP Cloud Platform, you’ll need to create a trial account for the
SAP Cloud Platform and
SAP BUILD.
There's more to come!
Let me know what you think below. I'm always looking for new ideas for exercises like this one here.