The Microsoft offers an online translation API to make requests through various forms (Http, Ajax, SOAP or OData.). The features provided by this API are very useful when we want to perform translations, multiple translations or even listen to the pronunciation of a certain word or phrase in desejada.Esta language library is an implementation in Python that allows to use most of the features present in this API. Basically what we do is, make a request to the Ajax API method by requests module and get the desired response. Below is a list of features offered by this library:
- Translation of one or multiple phrases and texts.
- Obtaining all possible translations for a word or multiple phrases.
- So speak, where you can hear the pronunciation of phrases or text in the desired language.
- This language detection on single or multiple sentences or texts.
- Obtaining all possible languages for translation and so speak.
You can use pip to make download and installation of the library. It is noteworthy that, it uses three modules: requests, json and urllib. Using the pip:
$ pip install BingTranslatorFirst of all, for us to use Microsoft's API we have to get a credential. Which to some extent is free, unlike the Google Translator API that is only within 30 days. It is noteworthy that the restriction to the free acquisition of credentials is 2 million characters per month, that is, you should not spend it. If you have an application that is used by a lot of customers, recommend reviewing it. To see all the steps that must be taken, go to the following link and follow the tutorial present in it: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/translation/p/gettingstarted1.aspx
The information that we will use are: the client_id and client_secret. These credentials are used in the request for adqurirmos the token that allows us to perform translations.
The use of the library is very simple, just by knowing what are the methods and their parameters. For example, we do a simple translation as follows:
from BingTranslator import Translator #importing Translator class for translations.
client_id = "<My-Client-Id>"
client_secret = "<My-Client-Secret>"
translator = Translator(client_id, client_secret)
phrase_translated = translator.translate("Hello World", "pt") #translating phrase
print (phrase_translated)To see the code of all languages, access the following link: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/hh456380.aspx. In the previous example, we use the 'en' code to have displaced who wish to translate our words into Portuguese.
The translate method may receive a number of parameters, as we can see in the table below.
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| text | Is the text to be translated. This parameter is required. |
| to_lang | This parameter corresponds to the language to which the text should be translated. This parameter is required. |
| from_lang | This parameter corresponds to this language in the current sentence. This parameter is not required because the Microsoft API recognizes this language in the text by default. |
| contentType | This parameter defines the type of data returned. By default it is set to "text/plain", but you can use another option, which is "text/html". This parameter is not required. |
| category | Matches the category of the sentence. By default this parameter is set to "General". This parameter is not required. |
One of the other methods in this library, much like the translate method is translate_texts. The difference between these two methods is that the latter accepts a list of strings as parameter. Besides the aforementioned differences, the translate_texts method allows the use of three additional parameters. Consider the table below:
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| uri | A string containing the content location of this translation. |
| user | A string used to track the originator of the submission. |
| state | User state to help correlate request and response. The same contents will be returned in the response. |
Example of use:
phrases_translated = translator.translate_texts(["Hello World","Python is all"], "pt") #translating phrase
print (phrase_translated)The return will be something like this:
[{'OriginalTextSentenceLengths': [9], 'TranslatedText': 'Olá o mundo', 'From': 'en', 'TranslatedTextSentenceLengths': [12]}, {'OriginalTextSentenceLengths': [10], 'TranslatedText': 'Python é tudo', 'From': 'en', 'TranslatedTextSentenceLengths': [15]}]
The get_translations method returns all possible translations for a word in the language. This method is very similar to the previous (translate_texts), the difference is that you must pass as parameter only a text/word and he has a parameter called maxTranslations that is required. This parameter defines the number of possible translations that the API should return to you. Example of use:
trans = translator.get_translations("Speak", "pt", 2)
print (trans)The return will be something like this:
{'Translations': [{'MatchDegree': 100, 'Rating': 5, 'MatchedOriginalText': '', 'TranslatedText': 'Fala', 'Count': 0}, {'MatchDegree': 99, 'Rating': 1, 'MatchedOriginalText': 'speak', 'TranslatedText': 'Falar', 'Count': 1}], 'From': 'en'}
The other very similar method to this is the get_multiple_translations. The difference between this and the former is that you will pass this parameter as a list of strings rather than just a string. Example of use:
trans = translator.get_translations(["Speak","Fly"], "pt", 2)
print (trans)The detect method, as its name implies, identifies the language used in a given sentence. He will receive only one parameter, which is the desired phrase. Example of use:
trans = translator.detect_language("My name is Jonas")
print (trans)In return we will have the code of the corresponding language to the text. In the example above, we get an answer the following: 'en'; Indicating that the text is in English. We can also identify the present languages in various texts by simply we use the detect_texts method, which receive as parameter a list of strings. Example of use:
trans = translator.detect_languages(["My name is Jonas","Voar, subir, cair."])
print (trans)The speak_phrase method is responsible for providing us with a link to download the audio containing the desired phrase. This method will receive different parameters from previous. Let's look at the table below:
| Parameter Name | Description |
|---|---|
| text | Text to be spoken. This parameter is required. |
| language | Language in which the text should be spoken. |
| format_audio | This parameter defines the audio format. By default the audio defined by Microsoft API file format is the "audio/wav", but you can use another parameter, which is, "audio/mp3". This parameter is not required. |
| option | This parameter defines the audio quality. By default, the quality used by the API is "MinQuality", but we can use the value "MaxQuality" to indicate that we want a better quality audio with. Worth to emphasize that this will influence the size of the file to download. This parameter is not required. |
Example of use:
trans = translator.speak_phrase("Back to the future", "en", "audio/mp3", "MaxQuality")
print (trans)In return we will have a string containing a URL to perform download the audio. To do this, we can use DownloadAudio class with the download method, to use the audio locally. Example of use:
from BingTranslator import Translator, DownloadAudio
client_id = "<My-Client-Id>"
client_secret = "<My-Client-Secret>"
translator = Translator(client_id, client_secret)
url = translator.speak_phrase("Back to the future", "en", "audio/mp3", "MaxQuality")
DownloadAudio.download(url, "audios/","aud01.mp3")The download of DownloadAudio class static method receive three parameters. The first is the url to download the audio, the second the directory where it is stored and finally the audio name. Note that audio extension must be the same length stated in the call speak_phrase method. For example, in the above code I set that I would have an extension "audio/mp3" and download method I set the file name with an extension mp3.
BingTranslator
Copyright (c) 2014, Will Filho, All rights reserved.
This library is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU Lesser General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation; either version 3.0 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.
This library is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU Lesser General Public License for more details.
You should have received a copy of the GNU Lesser General Public License along with this library.