I’ve been monitoring CodePlex for a while now — looking out for VB.NET projects seeking additional help.

Most of them were either not to my liking (too much reliance on third-party library files, too far outside of my interests, etc.), but I did stumble upon one that I felt like I could help out with.

I decided to help out with goTranslateIt. It’s not the most complex project out there, but I saw enough of the code to see opportunities for improvement.

It was fun to work on.

Realistically, I’m not sure how practical the application is in terms of real-world usage. For me, if I need to translate something, I typically just load up a web-based translator, get the translation, and I’m done.

There aren’t many situations I can think of where people need to do enough translations where they’d want a winform-based application installed on their system.

I like doing fine-tuning of GUI functionality or coming up with ways to make things a bit more efficient. I had a lot of opportunities for that.

Also enjoyable was closing out the only open issue of the app — a bug that seemed to only affect translations for Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Cajun Creole when using the Bing translation API. The problem was easy to identify and thanks to other changes I made during my initial code cleanup, the fix was pretty simple.

Going forward, the biggest improvements I could see for it would be to make a more generic Translation Provider class and implement the Google and Bing methods within that. Hopefully this would help simplify things a bit and make it easier to add additional translators later on…