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March 21, 2008

Useful Google Translate Addresses

Translate a web page:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=it|en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English.


Translate a web page into English (the input language is detected automatically):

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=URL

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=en&u=http://www.corriere.it/ translates Corriere della Sera's homepage from Italian into English, but without explicitly mentioning that the web page is written in Italian.


Use Google Translate as a proxy:

http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&u=URL

You basically want to read the page in its initial language, but loaded from Google's servers. LANG2 should be the code for your web page's language, while LANG1 can be any supported language so that LANG1|LANG2 is a valid language pair.

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=fr|en&u=http://craigslist.org shows Craigslist's home page using Google Translate as a way to bypass security restrictions.


Translate a text:

http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=LANG1|LANG2&text=TEXT

Example: http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=en|es&text=Hello, world! translates "Hello, world!" from English into Spanish.


Notes:

1. the language pairs are listed in this FAQ, while the language codes are included in this long list.

2. To disable Google Translate's annoying tooltips that show the original text, block this JavaScript file: http://209.85.135.104/translate_c.js, for example by adding a new rule in Adblock Plus for Firefox or by using Opera's content blocker.

17 comments:

  1. I tried to read the Italian translated to English and it was awful.

    ReplyDelete
  2. I sometimes use Gtrans as a proxy to bypass corporate filters, (xlate English to Spanish, for example, then mouseover to see orginal). Would be more useful as proxy if could fake the xlate - translate English to English ...

    ReplyDelete
  3. Also use the FF add-on to xlate a page I'm viewing.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Google doesn't allow you to translate from English to English anymore, but you can always pretend that you're translating from a different language to English (for example, from Spanish to English).

    ReplyDelete
  5. is there a way to just return an xml document for the "Translate a Text" example.

    I'm wondering this, as I'm curious if google's translate tool can be used by sites to translate text.

    at the moment the work around is
    @file_get_contents("http://www.google.com/translate_t?langpair=en|es&text=Hello, world!")

    preg_match('/< d i v id=result_box dir=ltr>(.*?)<\/ d i v >/', $in, $out);

    or there is a good tool out there already for what I am after?

    ReplyDelete
  6. @feeble:
    You no longer need to scrape the text. Use the translation API for JavaScript. "With the AJAX Language API, you can translate and detect the language of blocks of text within a webpage using only Javascript."

    ReplyDelete
  7. @ionut Alex Chitu:
    I have been looking over the "translation API for JavaScript"

    Its not perfect, but its pretty close.

    Thank you.

    ReplyDelete
  8. But some clever ip tracking solutions will be able to track your real ip address even after using google translation, i.e. http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&langpair=it|en&u=http://www.tracemyip.com

    ReplyDelete
  9. How do I switch off Google Translate when I do not need it??
    How do I remove it completely from Firefox?
    I am running OSX 10.4.11 Gerald

    ReplyDelete
  10. I would like to suggest a new (great) feature. The idea is to allow the name "ask" to be used as the second language in a langpair element, as in the following example:

    http://www.google.com/translate_c?langpair=it|ask&u=http://www.corriere.it

    This link would jump to a new page presenting a table of flags, allowing the user to select the target language. Then, by clicking in one of the flags flag, the translation would performed immediately.

    Sometimes you are not allowed to use those nice translation widgets because they require JavaScript. My idea allows the translation to be made using two clicks, which is good enough.

    ReplyDelete
  11. You can select the language pair using the dropdowns recently added by Google.

    ReplyDelete
  12. Thank you for your answer. I afraid I did not provide enough context.

    I have some HTML pages stored in some site that forbids the use of JavaScript code in the pages. So, I'm limited to plain HTML.

    I would like to add a link - named "Google translation" - to each of my pages, that would allow the visitors to translate them to their language in a simple way. My current solution uses a table of national flags, but this corresponds to a large block of "polluting" HTML code... I'm looking for something much simpler. So, I come up with this idea of the "ask" language, one idea that can be useful for other users of the Google services.

    This is only an idea... hopefully someone at Google likes it. Anyway, if there is already a one-liner HTML solution to my small problem, I would like to know about that. Thanks!

    ReplyDelete
  13. 1. You don't need to use JavaScript for a simple form. Use a drop-down that lists the destination languages. To generate the "action" URL, use values like it|fr for French, it|en for English etc. and name the select field "langpair".

    2. Never use flags to represent languages because there's no one-to-one correspondence between languages and countries. I explained more about this here.

    ReplyDelete
  14. Thank you for your advice. I agree with you about the use national flags.
    You solution is not the "one-liner" I was looking for, but still it is an improvement.
    Thanks again.

    ReplyDelete
  15. I am wondering how to show a link to a site in English when the standard search is making for a string in Hebrew. In other words, the search string in Hebrew should be translated automatically into its English equivalent and the relevant site in English will appear among the results of the search. If I am searching for English translation of the string in Hebrew that site is appeared as a top one.

    ReplyDelete
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