I'm pretty new with Custom Translator and I'm working on a fashion-related EN_KO project.
There are many cases where a single English term has two possible translations into Korean. An example: if "fastening"is related to "bags, backpacks..." is 잠금 but if it's related to "clothes, shoes..." is 여밈.
I'd like to train the machine to recognize these differences. Could it be useful to upload a phrase dictionary? Any ideas? Thanks!
The purpose of training a custom translation system is to teach it how to translate terms in context.
The best way to teach the system how to translate is training with parallel documents of full sentence prose: the same document in two languages. A translation memory extract in a TMX or XLIFF file is the best material, but many other document formats are suitable as well, as long as you have both languages. Have at least 10000 sentences in both languages, upload to http://customtranslator.ai, and build a custom system with it.
If you have documents in Korean that are representative of the terminology and style you want to achieve, without an English match, you can automatically translate those to English, and add to the training material as parallel documents. Be sure to not use the automatically translated documents in the other direction.
A phrase dictionary is of limited help, because it is unaware of context. It is useful only in bootstrapping your custom system or for very rare terms where you cannot find or create a sentence.
I'm a technologist at a news company and inherited systems that never migrated our old stories out of the first CMS iteration. I'd like to do so, but the cost of software support is many thousands of dollars. No matter: they are plaintext-ish and it appears I can extract the contents.
Can anyone recognize this file format as parseable for programmatic extraction?
Here are the original files per #Jongware's help in the comments:
https://github.com/mcnaughton/mystery/blob/master/1?raw=true
https://github.com/mcnaughton/mystery/blob/master/2?raw=true
https://github.com/mcnaughton/mystery/blob/master/3?raw=true
Here are the hex dumps:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcnaughton/mystery/master/hexdumps/1
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcnaughton/mystery/master/hexdumps/2
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mcnaughton/mystery/master/hexdumps/3
Here is an example of a useless ASCII version: https://gist.github.com/buley/3acd74d2bf418520c309
My boss just asked me to convert many CSV files to ANSI X12 Standards text files. I have no idea how to do this. Wonder if there is an app or software to do this?
Thanks
Yes, there are a plethora of software packages that can help you translate CSV to EDI. What EDI documents do you need to create?
Liaison Delta and ECS can do it quite easily (and my recommendation). CSV is a very common file format. There are a ton of universal data translators that have this functionality. Boomi, Sterling Commerce, GXS/Inovis, Extol, 1EDISource. There are also hosted solutions like SPS Commerce and DI Central that will do the translation for you.
I am working of a file preparation software to enable translators work easily and efficiently on a wide range of file formats.
As far as text-based formats (xml, php, resource files,...) are concerned, my small preparation utility works fine, but a major problem for most translators is to handle all kinds of proprietary binary formats (Framemaker, Publisher, Quark...).
These files are rarely requested and need to be opened in expensive applications (few freelance can afford to buy $20,000 worth of software just to handle a few projects per year), and even then it is not convenient to work directly in those applications anyway.
I would like to be able to read these files and extract the text in such a way that it can be translated and then re-imported in the original application with minimal effort, or even better, to recreate a valid native binary file.
Does that sound doable?
Where can I find more information on handling binary file formats and are there useful tools for these kind of jobs (besides regular hex editors)?
Thanks in advance.
Of course reverse engineering is possible, but without format specs it will take a lot of work. I would look at the return on effort regarding supporting these 'rarely requested, very expensive' formats. You may be better off spending that effort improving the core functionality of your app.
Another angle is to contact the companies with these formats, explain your goal, explain that it helps their product, and if they don't see you as competition they might be willing to help.
I know that you want to reverse engineer them - but since these may be propriety file formats you are looking at a very steep curve trying to decode them...
Some (as I have written some propritety formats for interal use before) have specific methods and objects written into them that serve some alternative process than the file contents themselves. Stuff that would prove the new file is illegal.
Just my 2 cents and I am no lawyer =>
Maybe you could pick a cheaper application which has import features for QuarkXPress. For example InDesign should be able to read Quark documents. Then use the importing application to export to whatever format you need - maybe with a help of plug-in.
What tools are available to aid in decoding unknown binary data formats?
I know Hex Workshop and 010 Editor both support structures. These are okay to a limited extent for a known fixed format but get difficult to use with anything more complicated, especially for unknown formats. I guess I'm looking at a module for a scripting language or a scriptable GUI tool.
For example, I'd like to be able to find a structure within a block of data from limited known information, perhaps a magic number. Once I've found a structure, then follow known length and offset words to find other structures. Then repeat this recursively and iteratively where it makes sense.
In my dreams, perhaps even automatically identify possible offsets and lengths based on what I've already told the system!
Here are some tips that come to mind:
From my experience, interactive scripting languages (I use Python) can be a great help. You can write a simple framework to deal with binary streams and some simple algorithms. Then you can write scripts that will take your binary and check various things. For example:
Do some statistical analysis on various parts. Random data, for example, will tell you that this part is probably compressed/encrypted. Zeros may mean padding between parts. Scattered zeros may mean integer values or Unicode strings and so on. Try to spot various offsets. Try to convert parts of the binary into 2 or 4 byte integers or into floats, print them and see if they make sence. Write some functions that will search for repeating or very similar parts in the data, this way you can easily spot headers.
Try to find as many strings as possible, try different encodings (c strings, pascal strings, utf8/16, etc.). There are some good tools for that (I think that Hex Workshop has such a tool). Strings can tell you a lot.
Good luck!
For Mac OS X, there's a great tool that's even better than my iBored: Synalyze It!
(http://www.synalysis.net/)
Compared to iBored, it is better suited for non-blocked files, while also giving full control over structures, including scriptability (with Lua). And it visualizes structures better, too.
Tupni; to my knowledge not directly available out of Microsoft Research, but there is a paper about this tool which can be of interest to someone wanting to write a similar program (perhaps open source):
Tupni: Automatic Reverse Engineering of Input Formats (# ACM digital library)
Abstract
Recent work has established the importance of automatic reverse
engineering of protocol or file format specifications. However, the
formats reverse engineered by previous tools have missed important
information that is critical for security applications. In this
paper, we present Tupni, a tool that can reverse engineer an input
format with a rich set of information, including record sequences,
record types, and input constraints. Tupni can generalize the format
specification over multiple inputs. We have implemented a
prototype of Tupni and evaluated it on 10 different formats: five
file formats (WMF, BMP, JPG, PNG and TIF) and five network
protocols (DNS, RPC, TFTP, HTTP and FTP). Tupni identified all
record sequences in the test inputs. We also show that, by aggregating
over multiple WMF files, Tupni can derive a more complete
format specification for WMF. Furthermore, we demonstrate the
utility of Tupni by using the rich information it provides for zeroday
vulnerability signature generation, which was not possible with
previous reverse engineering tools.
My own tool "iBored", which I released just recently, can do parts of this. I wrote the tool to visualize and debug file system formats (UDF, HFS, ISO9660, FAT etc.), and implemented search, copy and later even structure and templates support. The structure support is pretty straight-forward, and the templates are a way to identify structures dynamically.
The entire thing is programmable in a Visual BASIC dialect, allowing you to test values, read specific blocks, and all.
The tool is free, works on all platforms (Win, Mac, Linux), but as it's personal tool which I just released to the public to share it, it's not much documented.
However, if you want to give it a try, and like to give feedback, I might add more useful features.
I'd even open source it, but as it's written in REALbasic, I doubt many people will join such a project.
Link: iBored home page
I still occasionally use an old hex editor called A.X.E., Advanced Hex Editor. It seems to have largely disappeared from the Internet now, though Google should still be able to find it for you. The last version I know of was version 3.4, but I've really only used the free-for-personal-use version 2.1.
Its most interesting feature, and the one I've had the most use for deciphering various game and graphics formats, is its graphical view mode. That basically just shows you the file with each byte turned into a color-coded pixel. And as simple as that sounds, it has made my reverse-engineering attempts a lot easier at times.
I suppose doing it by eye is quite the opposite of doing automatic analysis, though, and the graphical mode won't be much use for finding and following offsets...
The later version has some features that sound like they could fit your needs (scripts, regularity finder, grammar generator), but I have no idea how good they are.
There is Hachoir which is a Python library for parsing any binary format into fields, and then browse the fields. It has lots of parsers for common formats, but you can also write own parsers for your files (eg. when working with code that reads or writes binary files, I usually write a Hachoir parser first to have a debugging aid). Looks like the project is pretty much inactive by now, though.
Kaitai is an open-source language for describing binary structures in data streams. It comes with a translator that can output parsing code for many programming languages, for inclusion in your own program code.
My project icebuddha.com supports this using python to describe the format in the browser.
A cut'n'paste of my answer to a similar question:
One tool is WinOLS, which is designed for interpreting and editing vehicle engine managment computer binary images (mostly the numeric data in their lookup tables). It has support for various endian formats (though not PDP, I think) and viewing data at various widths and offsets, defining array areas (maps) and visualising them in 2D or 3D with all kinds of scaling and offset options. It also has a heuristic/statistical automatic map finder, which might work for you.
It's a commercial tool, but the free demo will let you do everything but save changes to the binary and use engine management features you don't need.