Sanzang is an open source, cross-platform, simple, fast, free and compact machine translation system implemented in Ruby and designed from the ground up to be used for translating text from the Chinese, Korean and Japanese languages to English.

The program has been engineered in such a way that it can recognize both difficult to read and ancient CJK (Chinese, Japanese, Korean) texts. It’s crafted to be approachable and small, supporting Linux, BSD, Microsoft Windows and Mac OS X operating systems.

With Sanzang you will be able to develop your own translation rules, which are stored in a text file and can be easily applied at runtime. It includes several command-line options, which can be viewed at a glance by running the ‘sanzang --help’ command in the Terminal app.

Among these, we can mention the ‘batch’ command, which allows you to translate multiple files simultaneously, the ‘reflow’ command that lets you to format Chinese, Korean or Japanese text for translation, as well as the ‘translate’ command, which can be used for single text translations.

Despite the fact that it is written in the Ruby programming language and that it uses a different configuration/compilation method, installing Sanzang proves to be an easy task for every Linux users.

First of all, you will have to download the latest version of the project from Softpedia or via its official website (see link at the end of the article). Save the archive somewhere on your PC, extract it with your favorite archive manager, and open the Terminal app.

In the terminal emulator, the ‘cd’ command will help you to navigate to the location of the extracted archive files (e.g. cd /home/softpedia/sanzang-1.1.2), where you will have to execute the ‘rake’ command to built the gem binary.

To install the gem file on your GNU/Linux machine, run the ‘sudo gem install --local dist/sanzang-1.1.2.gem’ command. Please note that the ruby-parallel package must be installed prior to attempting to install Sanzang.