Lost in translation

Summary: After applying the 2007-004 security update to Mac OS X the translation widget stopped working. The problem was a corrupted preferences file and it was solved after deleting the file.

Details: I have been using the translation widget without any serious problems (except that it takes forever to actually translate things). About a week ago, I applied the latest security patches to Mac OS X (Security Update 2007-004) and restarted the system. After restarting, the translation widget appeared different. I don't have any screenshots but the main visual difference was that the SYSTRAN logo appeared in the background of the widget. The real problem though, was that I could not select the languages for translation from the pop-up menus and I could not write anything in the two text fields.

My initial thought was that the security update modified the translation widget. I was wrong. I went through the BOM of the update and there was no mention of the translation widget. A Google search revealed that there has been at least one person, almost two years ago with a similar problem. He managed to solve the problem by deleting the file ~/Library/Preferences/widget-com.apple.widget.translation.plist which holds the preferences for the translation widget. Of course I did the same (actually renamed the file) and the problem was solved.

Out of curiosity, I tried to figure out what caused the problem. It turned out that the "corrupted" preferences file had one extra preference called http://www.apple.com/widgets/translationParser.js that contained some Javascript code. The code appeared legit, in the sense that it was the exact same code that is contained in the previous link except for the fact that HTML entities in the preferences file were escaped (&lt; instead of <, &amp;amp; instead of &amp; and &amp; instead of &).

The fact that the preferences file was corrupted also means that the fact that the problem appeared after applying the security update was probably coincidental.