How to use Google Translate using Python

All of us are aware of Google Translate. Today, we will provide examples of how we can use the googletrans which is a free and unlimited python library that implemented Google Translate API. This uses the Google Translate Ajax API to make calls to such methods as detect and translate .

The first thing that we need to do is to install the googletrans library. I suggest to use the conda install command.

conda install -c conda-forge googletrans
 

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How to get the supported languages

Google Translate supports more than 100 languages. Below, we give an example of how you can get the supported language and their corresponding code:

import pandas as pd
import googletrans
from googletrans import Translator

translator = Translator()
pd.set_option('max_colwidth', 300)


# how to get the supported language and their corresponing code
lang_df = pd.DataFrame.from_dict(googletrans.LANGUAGES,  orient='index', columns=['Language'])
lang_df

 

      Language
af   afrikaans
sq    albanian
am     amharic
ar      arabic
hy    armenian
..         ...
yi     yiddish
yo      yoruba
zu        zulu
fil   Filipino
he      Hebrew

[106 rows x 1 columns]

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Let’s say that we want to get the code of specific languages, like ‘English‘, ‘Italian‘, ‘Spanish‘, ‘French‘, and ‘Greek‘.

# find the code for english, french, italian, spanish and greek
lang_df[lang_df.Language.isin(['english', 'french', 'italian', 'spanish', 'greek'])]
 

   Language
en  english
fr   french
el    greek
it  italian
es  spanish

How to detect the language

Google Translate can detect the language. Let’s give an example:

my_example = translator.detect("Cerco un centro di gravità permanente")
print(my_example)
 

Detected(lang=it, confidence=1.0)

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As we can see, Google detected that the “Cerco un centro di gravità permanente” is Italian with a confidence of 100%

How to translate from source language to destination language

The translate function translates from source language to destination language taking as default “English” as destination language and as a source language it tries to detect the language.

translator.translate(text, dest='en', src='auto')

In our example, we will define the source and the destination language. Let’s say that we want to translate the above “Italian” sentence to “English”.

my_translation = translator.translate("Cerco un centro di gravità permanente", src='it', dest='en')
print(my_translation.text)
 

I am seeking a permanent center of gravity

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The object returned by the translate() method has the following attributes:

• src: The source language, which is set to Italin (it)
• dest: Destination language, which is set to English (en)
• origin: Original text, that is ‘Cerco un centro di gravità permanente‘ in our example
• text: Translated text, which was ‘I am seeking a permanent center of gravity‘ in our case
• pronunciation: Pronunciation of the translated text

How to translate multiple documents at once

Let’s assume that you have the English documents in a pandas data frame, and you want to get the translation in Italian. Let’s provide a data frame with English documents.

my_example = pd.DataFrame({'EnglishText':['Police in France say they have seized 140,000 face masks that were destined for sale on the black market.', 
                             'Officers say they discovered the haul when they spotted a businessman unloading the masks from a lorry into a house in St Denis, north of Paris.',
                             'Prime Minister Boris Johnson could possibly lead the daily news conference on Monday but, if not then, it will be pretty soon afterwards.']})

my_example 
 

        EnglishText
0	Police in France say they have seized 140,000 face masks that were destined for sale on the black market.
1	Officers say they discovered the haul when they spotted a businessman unloading the masks from a lorry into a house in St Denis, north of Paris.
2	Prime Minister Boris Johnson could possibly lead the daily news conference on Monday but, if not then, it will be pretty soon afterwards.
 

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my_example['ItalianText'] = my_example['EnglishText'].apply(lambda x: translator.translate(x, src='en', dest='it').text )
my_example
 

	EnglishText	ItalianText
0	Police in France say they have seized 140,000 face masks that were destined for sale on the black market.	La polizia in Francia dicono di aver sequestrato 140.000 maschere per il viso che erano destinati per la vendita sul mercato nero.
1	Officers say they discovered the haul when they spotted a businessman unloading the masks from a lorry into a house in St Denis, north of Paris.	Gli ufficiali dicono che hanno scoperto il raggio quando hanno avvistato un uomo d’affari scarico le maschere da un camion in una casa a St Denis, a nord di Parigi.
2	Prime Minister Boris Johnson could possibly lead the daily news conference on Monday but, if not then, it will be pretty soon afterwards.	Il primo ministro Boris Johnson potrebbe condurre la conferenza stampa quotidiana il Lunedi, ma, se non allora, sarà abbastanza presto dopo.

Happy Translations!