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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12 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 11:46 am
[...] blog.programmableweb.com [...]
at 1:13 am
[...] has been a busy stretch for Google APIs: besides the recently released new AJAX Translation API this month, Google also launched the Google Visualization API, a JavaScript API which lets you access multiple [...]
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
[...] Google Releases Language Translation API [via Zemanta] [...]
at 6:55 am
[...] it is possible to use clever and simple programming calls to Google’s new “translation API” to translate (almost any) blog-post into English temporarily generating semantic results [...]
at 12:19 pm
[...] και απλές προγραμματιστικές κλήσεις στην υπηρεσία API του Google για μετάφραση, για να μεταφράσουν (σχεδόν κάθε) [...]
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..