If you’ve read the “Special Language Techniques” chapter of W9KNI’s excellent “The Complete Dxer”, you know that being able to understand and speak “QSO French” or “QSO Swahili” can make a big difference in your quest to work an all-time new one. Including a “mon ami” or “shukran” in a CW or RTTY QSO makes it more memorable for your QSO partner. Between ~20 years of international business activities and DXing, I can say something appropriate and timely in maybe 10 languages, but this is a small fraction of the languages in use by “the DX”. What I’ve long contemplated is a “Universal Translator” for DXers.
If you can type quickly under pressure and have a fast, reliable internet connection, Google’s Translation page can approximate this function. However, many of its translations aren’t exactly correct; when you discover that “my report” in Italian is “il mio rapporto” rather than “la mia relazione”, there’s no way to update Google to display the correct translation next time. What’s needed is a translation capability that can be populated with DX-oriented phrases and quickly updated.
DXView is a component of the free-ware DXLab Suite. DXView’s role in life is to show you everything that can be determined from a callsign – it’s DXCC entity, location, CQ zone, ITU zone, IOTA tag, shortpath and longpath headings, LotW participation and last upload date, eQSL AG registration, etc. DXView automatically interoperates with whatever other members of the DXLab Suite are running on your PC, so double-clicking a spotted callsign will cause DXView to display that callsign’s information, as will double-clicking a decoded PSK or RTTY callsign.
DXView accomplishes this by searching a set of databases that it installs and maintains on your PC: a DXCC database that relates prefixes to entities and regions, a USAP database that knows the State and zipcode-based location of every callsign issued by the US FCC, an IOTA database containing all IOTA tags, an LotW database augmented with “last upload date” information obtained weekly from the ARRL, and an eQSL AG database that’s also updated weekly. Because some of these databases are so frequently updated, the process of downloading and updating a database has been automated to the point of requiring only a few mouse clicks.
I have extended DXView to serve as a Universal Translator by equipping it with a Translation database that knows ~50 DXing words and phrases in 68 languages. Type in or double-click a callsign, and DXView’s Translation window will display the words and phrases you employ most frequently in each of the languages used in that callsign’s DXCC entity. Here’s what my Translation window looks like after activating a Vatican callsign:
http://www.dxlabsuite.com/dxview/English-Vatican.jpgThis capability isn’t designed exclusively for English speakers; you can select any of the supported 68 languages as your native language. Here’s what a Japanese Dxer working a Vatican operator might see:
http://www.dxlabsuite.com/dxview/Japanese-Vatican.jpgIf more than one language is in use in the DX station’s DXCC entity, multiple translations are shown; here’s what a Norwegian DXer working a station in Cameroon might see:
http://www.dxlabsuite.com/dxview/Norwegian-Cameroon.jpgThere are plenty of holes in the Translation database -- the words “one” through “ten’ in Urdu are missing, for example – but the user community is helping to both fill in the holes and improve the translations; DXView’s “Universal Translator” feature isn’t a week old yet, and there have already been two updates to the Translation database. There’s some up-front setup involved: 50 words and phrases take up lots of space, so you’ll want to arrange their order so that the ones you expect to reference frequently can be seen without scrolling. I expect the Translation window’s user interface to evolve based on user feedback – just like most every other capability in DXLab.
While DXView is a component of the DXLab Suite, it can be used as a standalone application alongside whatever station automation software you prefer. It’s free, and available via
www.dxlabsuite.comDocumentation for this feature can be found by viewing
<http://www.dxlabsuite.com/dxview/Help/Operation.htm#Displaying translations of amateur radio phrases>
or by clicking one of DXView’s Help buttons.
Dobar DX!
73,
Dave, AA6YQ
