google-translate

Description

This is a simple Python script to leverage Google's very useful Translate to translate a phrase, given by the user, from and into languages of the user's choice (given that Google Translate supports them).

Motivation

The Google Translate API is a paid service, but you can easily use Google to translate your phrases without using the API. This is exactly what this does.

Installation

It uses standard Python distribution utilities, so it's as simple as doing this:

$ git clone https://github.com/drewsberry/google-translate.git

$ cd google-translate

$ python setup.py install

Usage

Well, you can always run python google_translate.py --help to get more help, but here's how you'd basically use it:

$ python google_translate.py "dog" --from "English" --to "Mongolian"

You could also use it as part of another Python program:

>>> from google_translate.google_translate import translate

>>> my_phrase = "Hund"

>>> from_lang = "German"

>>> to_lang = "Chinese"

>>> translate(my_phrase, from_lang, to_lang)

How It Works

Essentially, this program does two things:

• Uses urllib2 to make a connection to Google and requests the page corresponding to the query giving the translation we want, spoofing the Chrome browser user agent; and
• Uses Beautiful Soup to parse the resulting HTML and identify the elements that are always used to contain the translation, then extracts them.

It's basically a very simple web scraper.

Features

• If the program detects that the phrase has been translated to a non-roman alphabet language, then it returns both the true translation and the romanisation of the translation.

Todo

• Give option to also give "more translations"
• Give option to return/print Unicode code.
• More rigorously test of all the different options.