The documentation tells us that we should issue requests with URLs in the format KEY&q=TEXT TO TRANSLATE&source=SOURCE LANGUAGE CODE&target=TARGET LANGUAGE CODE The first step naturally is to make a request to the Google Translate API in the documentation, we can see that it is possible to consume the API in two ways: either with some JavaScript code, or by making a REST request directly to the service and get in return the result in JSON format almost ready to use – this is what we are going to do.įirst of all, you’ll need a Google Account -if you don’t own an account already, create one- and you’ll also need to request an API key to be able to consume the service. We could manipulate this JSON response once again with filters based on regular expressions as seen in the previous example, but there is an easy way of parsing this JSON directly from the command line, with a utility called jsawk, that works in a very similar way to awk but specifically with JSON-formatted text. This API can be consumed with usual HTTP requests, but returns a JSON response rather than a normal HTML web page, as it is designed to be integrated by developers in other applications and services.

We could do something similar with Google Translate, however there is a quicker and better way to achieve the same result, by using the Google Translate API.

In the previous example, we have seen how easy it is to fetch any kind of web page from the command line by using utilities such as wget or similar we’ve also seen how we can manipulate and format the content returned, for example to adapt it for display in a terminal. So, how can we use Google Translate from the command line? Google, in particular, offer APIs for just about every one of their web services, including the very popular Google Translate, which I also use a lot to translate mostly from and to English, Finnish, Italian. In a previous post, I showed a nice shortcut I use quite often to search for definitions, with Google‘s define search feature, from the command line rather than from within a browser.Īs I always have a few terminal windows open at any time, I often look for ways of using some popular web services from the command line as this can be fun and save time too nowadays many web services having a UI that can be consumed with a browser, also expose APIs that allow developers to integrate these web services in their applications or web mashups. (Update Jan 14, 2011: If you have already used this tip and are back to this post because it’s no longer working, read on… Google have updated the Translate API v2, so I have made some changes to the end of the post accordingly.)

Google translate api v2