Build a language translator using Python and google trans

Know only one language? Don’t worry, in this post we will learn how to build our own translator so that we don’t have to look for a translator to understand the language we are not familiar with. Having a translation device when we travel to a new place where where we don’t speak their native language will help us communicate with the locals and ask for their help.

Google translate is a free service that we can use to translate words, phrases or sentences to another language. We are going to use the googletrans Python library to translate between languages. Currently, it supports 107 languages.

Create a virtual environment if you want to install the packages separately inside a particular environment:

$ py -3 -m venv env
$ .\env\Scripts\activate

Installation

We will begin by installing the google trans library:

$ pip install googletrans==4.0.0-rc1

Implementation

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i. Create a file named ‘ Translate.py’ ii. Import the library

import googletrans # In order to use google trans library 
from googletrans import Translator

ii. Create and instance of googletrans

t = Translator()

iii. Store all the supported languages in a variable

supported_langs = googletrans.LANGUAGES

iv. Let’s try to print the supported languages

# Print all the languages in 
print('Supported languages: ')
for key, value in supported_langs.items():
    print(key, ':', value)

v. We will create a function to get the input which will be the source language. This language will be translated to another language

# Get the source language
def get_source():
    source_lang = input('Source language: ')

    # is source_lang in lanuguage keys
    if source_lang in supported_langs.keys():
        return source_lang

    # Check if it is present in language values
    for key, value in supported_langs.items():
        if source_lang == value:   # Check if the value is in 
            return key

    else:
        return ''

vi. Now we will create another function which will get the target language. The text we enter will be translated to this language.

# Get destination language
def get_dest():
    dest_lang = input('Translate to: ')    

    # if dest_lang in language key
    if dest_lang in supported_langs.keys():
        return dest_lang

    # Check if it is present in language values
    for key, value in supported_langs.items():
        if dest_lang == value:   
            return key

    else:
        return ''

vii. Create a function ‘translate()’ which will be used for translating the text by checking the source and destination language.

Note: Notice the commented print() functions, if you want to check what it prints in between, you can check by removing the comments.

def translate():
    print('Choose the language from the supported languages')
    source_lang = get_source()

    dest_lang = get_dest()

    text = input("Enter your Text: ")
    print("Text to be translated: "+ text)

    # Let's print the language of input text
    input_text = t.translate(text)
    s = input_text.src
    print('Entered text is in:', s) 

    if source_lang == '' or dest_lang == '':
        print("Invalid input...")

    try:
        if source_lang and dest_lang:  
            result = t.translate(text, src=source_lang, dest=dest_lang)   
            if source_lang == s:
                print(f'Translated text to {supported_langs[dest_lang]}: {result.text}')
                print(f"Pronunciation in {supported_langs[dest_lang]}: {result.pronunciation}")

            else:
                print('Enter in ', supported_langs[source_lang])

    except:
        print("Unable to understand the input...")

viii. It’s our translator, time to run our app:

Our final code is as follows:

import googletrans  
from googletrans import Translator

t = Translator()

# Store all the supported languages in a variable
supported_langs = googletrans.LANGUAGES   

# Print all the languages in 
print('Supported languages: ')
for key, value in supported_langs.items():
    print(key, ':', value)

# Get the source language
def get_source():
    source_lang = input('Source language: ')

    # is source_lang in lanuguage keys
    if source_lang in supported_langs.keys():
        return source_lang

    # Check if it is present in language values
    for key, value in supported_langs.items():
        if source_lang == value:   
            return key

    else:
        return ''

# Get destination language
def get_dest():
    dest_lang = input('Translate to: ')    

    # if dest_lang in language key
    if dest_lang in supported_langs.keys():
        return dest_lang

    # Check if it is present in language values
    for key, value in supported_langs.items():
        if dest_lang == value:   
            return key

    else:
        return ''

def translate():
    print('Choose the language from the supported languages')
    source_lang = get_source()
    # print(source_lang)

    dest_lang = get_dest()
    # print(dest_lang)

    text = input("Enter your Text: ")
    print("Text to be translated: "+ text)

    # Let's print the language of input text
    input_text = t.translate(text)
    s = input_text.src
    print('Entered text is in:', s) 

    if source_lang == '' or dest_lang == '':
        print("Invalid input...")

    try:
        if source_lang and dest_lang:  
            result = t.translate(text, src=source_lang, dest=dest_lang)   
            if source_lang == s:
                print(f'Translated text to {supported_langs[dest_lang]}: {result.text}')
                print(f"Pronunciation in {supported_langs[dest_lang]}: {result.pronunciation}")

            else:
                print('Enter in ', supported_langs[source_lang])

    except:
        print("Unable to understand the input...")



if __name__=='__main__':
    translate()  # Run it continuously
    while True:
        q = input('Do you want to continue? (y/n): ')
        if q == 'n':
            break
        else:
            translate()

GitHub link

Originally published at https://wulfi.hashnode.dev.