gotrans

A simple #golang tool to translate text using Azure Translation Services.

Introduction

Microsoft offers an excellent translation API on Azure than can be used (with limitation) for free that offers more capacity than soimort's translate-shell tool.

I'm a really fan of soimort's translate-shell tool but recently the limits imposed by the free Apis were very limiting. Also, because this tool is written in Golang which is more familiar than AWK.

About Microsoft Translator

Microsoft Translator is a cloud-based machine translation service. The core service is the Translator Text API, which powers a number of Microsoft products and services, and is used by thousands of businesses worldwide in their applications and workflows, which allows their content to reach a global audience.

What's offered by the Translator Text API

The Translator Text API is easy to integrate in your applications, websites, tools, and solutions. It allows you to add multi-language user experiences in more than 60 languages, and can be used on any hardware platform with any operating system for text-to-text language translation.

The Translator Text API is part of the Azure Cognitive Services API collection of machine learning and AI algorithms in the cloud, and is readily consumable in your development projects

Pricing

Azure's Cognitive Api provides up to 2M chars of standard translation per month which should be more than enough for regular users.

Creating an API Key

This tool requires an Azure Account. Creating an account in Azure is free and can be done at https://azure.microsoft.com/free/.

This document describes how to create a Cognitive Api Key on Azure.

Installation

Assuming you have Go installed, you can use go get (if you're using Go 1.7 or newer):

go get -u github.com/hd9/gotrans

Make sure the ~/go/bin path is present in your $PATH env var with:

PATH=$PATH:~/go/bin

Then run gotrans with:

gotrans -h

Usage

The tool can be used from the command line and accepts redirections and files as inputs.

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gotrans - Translate text using Azure Cognitive Services
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Usage:
    ./gotrans -t nl "<text-to-translate>"
    ./gotrans -t es -file <file>
    echo "text" | gotrans [OPTIONS]
    cat <file> | gotrans [OPTIONS]

Options:
  -h, --help
        Show help
  - string
        Text to translate
  -f string
        Source Language (optional). Set empty to auto-detect
  -file string
        File name
  -t string
        Target language. See list here: https://bit.ly/37o3PFX
  -v    Run in verbose mode

Vim

The tool can also be called from inside Vim. Simply select some text in visual mode and, assuming it's available on your $PATH, run:

'<,'> !gotrans -t es

Issues

This is alpha software and was developed in less than one day to cover my specific needs so expect bugs. Feel free to open an issue and contribute.

Thanks!

Related Resources

• What is the Translator Text API?
• Translator Text API 3.0
• Translator Text API 3.0: Languages
• Translator Text documentation
• How to sign up for the Translator Text API
• Quickstart: Use the Translator Text API to translate text
• MicrosoftTranslator / Text-Translation-API-V3-Go | GitHub
• Azure Cognitive Services
• translate-shell tool