Translation Portal

A web application that functions as a Chinese-English translation portal. The code is a generic Node.js Express application. These instructions describe deployment on App Engine Standard. The embedded Chinese-English dictionary is provided by the chinesedict-js JavaScript module.

Prerequisites

Download and install Node.js. Create a Google Cloud Platform (GCP) project and install the gcloud command line tool.

Setup

Clone this project from GitHub:

git clone https://github.com/alexamies/translation_portal
cd translation_portal

Set an environment variable to remember how to get back

PORTAL_HOME=`pwd`

Build the dictionary

Get the chinesedict-js module

cd web/static
npm install
CDICT_HOME=`pwd`/node_modules/@alexamies/chinesedict-js

Use the dictionary terms file from either the Chinese Notes for modern or literary Chinese of the NTI Reader project for Buddhist texts:

git clone https://github.com/alexamies/buddhist-dictionary.git
DICT_SOURCE_HOME=`pwd`/buddhist-dictionary

This contains a tab separated variable (TSV) dictionary file words.txt that we will use for building the JSON format dictionary that can be loaded by the JavaScriptmodule

cd $CDICT_HOME/build
npm install
node gen_dictionary.js $DICT_SOURCE_HOME/data/dictionary/words.txt

This generates the words.json file that should be copied to your web asset directory:

cd $PORTAL_HOME/web/static
mkdir dist
cp $CDICT_HOME/build/words.json dist/.

Configure the Browser Application Code

Copy the chinesedict-js module code and styles to the web asset directory

cp $CDICT_HOME/index.js dist/.
cp $CDICT_HOME/chinesedict.css dist/.

For cross-browser compatibility, copy the dialog-polyfill files to the web asset directory

cp $PORTAL_HOME/web/static/node_modules/dialog-polyfill/dialog-polyfill.js dist/.
cp $PORTAL_HOME/web/static/node_modules/dialog-polyfill/dialog-polyfill.css dist/.

Run locally

Run locally with Express:

cd $PORTAL_HOME/web
npm install
npm start

Browse to the app at http://localhost:8080

Deploy to App Engine

Set the default GCP project:

PROJECT=[Your project id]
gcloud config set project $PROJECT

Deploy to App Engine:

gcloud app deploy -q

Browse to the app

gcloud app browse

Restrict Access

To resrict the translation portal to a specific group of users, follow the instructions in the Google Cloud Identity Aware Proxy (IAP). You will need to add the crossorigin attribute on the HTML Script element to allow the JavaScript module to be loaded behind IAP.