Mail auto translation plugin?

[Remco Barendse]

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009, Alex Neuman wrote:

> How could you tell if the language was chinese, japanese or russian? From the codepages? What about UTF?

The character encoding would be one pointer, on the other hand, 
in translate.google.com you can select "Detect language" which works 
quite nicely for the languages i need (Japanese, Chinese and Russian).

To do it perfectly one could consider to including a list of common key 
words used in each language. Greetings are one, the salutations at the 
end are another, pretty much every non-spam e-mail will have that, and 
these are unique to a language. However this would be already thinking 
about a rock-solid Rolls Royce class plug-in.

I know building such a plugin that works on only one translation source is 
pretty thin but no other mail package has such a feature. I guess if the 
plugin will be ready enthusiasm and interest from the community will 
explode :)  No idea however how google might react to it once you start 
to invoke a nice load on their translation servers :) My mail volume 
will be low, about 100 messages a day.

My experience with scripting, procmail, programming etc. is about as much 
as my available free time, 0,0 :)

Let me know if you have any possibility to put something like that 
together.

Thanks!