As of today, the powerful Google Translate service that lets you translate between 13 different languages and 29 language pairs is now available as a handy JavaScript-based API. Given the breadth of the engine it’s built on, it already supports languages including Russian, Korean, Arabic, Italian, Greek, French and Spanish. It’s a simple but powerful API, given the number of uses this can be put to. Our new Google Translate API profile has more technical details.
As their announcement makes clear, it’s a very easy to use API with two main functions: language detection and language translation. The language translate() function just needs a string to translate, the source and destination languages, and a callback function. The detect() function takes a block of text and a callback.
Since language detection is very hard problem and not always perfect, the API provides two useful properties of a true/falue value “isReliable” and a 0-1.0 “confidence” value which together give an indication of how certain the language detector is in each case.
For some ideas on what uses this can put to, check-out our listing of 7 translation-related mashups in our directory now. These include the mashup shown below, Universal Chat Translator for Skype (download here), a plug-in built on the Skype API that translates chats in real-time:
Note that the API documentation makes it clear there are more features coming before long: “We plan on adding more exciting capabilities to the AJAX Language API in the future, so stay tuned.”
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29 Responses to “Google Releases Language Translation API”
at 7:40 am
Are there any volume restrictions? could I translate one million words every day?
at 7:40 am
@Renato, I believe you can only translate 500 words per request. I posted about this here.
at 9:08 am
@Renato: Good question. I missed it first time around but as dave points out the terms of service say you you will not “submit any request exceeding 500 characters in length, to the translation components of the Service”.
at 3:50 am
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at 1:13 am
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at 9:46 am
Google’s software will definitely have a problem with complex languages such as Chinese or Japanese because their words are not separated by spaces. They only show one possible translation when really you should be able to choose from multiple options. If you want to learn almost any language in the world, my site can help you.
http://www.google.co.jp/search?q=cutout+japanese+english+cutouttranslations&btnG=%E6%A4%9C%E7%B4%A2&hl=ja&lr=lang_ja&client=firefox-a&rls=org.mozilla%3Aja%3Aofficial&hs=k5L
at 3:53 am
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at 6:55 am
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at 11:48 am
I have developed Free Online Translation Service page which use Google AJAX Language API. I also used Google AJAX Language API to translate the user interface of Online Translation Service to the following languages: English, Arabic, Bulgarian, Chinese, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish, Swedish.
at 8:02 am
Yes, the google do have issues with the complex languages.. we noway understand..
at 9:32 am
I’ve used Google translation API in http://www.sms-translator.net, but I don’t know how to call “contribute” functions…
at 2:29 am
Free online translation software have a major problem, that is accuracy. When we start Chinese, Japanese and Arabic language translation through these free online tools. Their language conversion accuracy is very poor compare to human language translation, their also change meaning of sentence.
at 8:09 am
I really like this idea. We are offering professional translations services
at 3:40 am
very nice article
We are one of the Translation company in Delhi,India
http://www.languageconsultancyservices.com/
at 10:21 am
I’d like to add speech to http://www.mobile-translator.net , but Google Language API doesn’t contain any speech function.
at 9:13 am
Google translation API is great, but sometimes a human translation is needed to avoid problems. At http://www.live-translator.net you can have both.
at 10:10 pm
I have used this API in C# but I never tried out the javascript one. thanks for the post.
at 12:18 pm
Why i can’t install OnTranslator on my macbook? Can’t understand what the problem. Does anyone uses that translator?
at 8:45 am
I’ve tried many times, but has not been successful and hard at all, what is wrong. why? thanks for the information
at 10:05 am
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