Google Translator

• Download source code - 13 Kb
• Download demo application (binaries only) - 13 Kb

What is it?

GoogleTranslator is an object that allows you to translate English text to French, German, Italian, Spanish or Portugese and back by harnessing the power of Google's online language tools. GoogleTranslator is an example of a WebResourceProvider and makes use of the StringParser utility class, both of which are published elsewhere at CodeProject. The demo app also performs a reverse translation, which can often appear amusing when compared to the original text. The app can be used as a poor man's resource translator for simple phrases, but you'd be wise to confirm the translation with a native speaker before using the results.

How do I use it?

You use GoogleTranslator by initializing its translating mode and calling its translate() method.

// Translate from English to French
GoogleTranslator gt =
  new GoogleTranslator (GoogleTranslator.Mode.EnglishToFrench);
string strEnglish = "Hello, how are you?";
string strFrench = gt.translate (strEnglish);

How it works

GoogleTranslator works by posting a request to Google's online translation form and parsing the results. All the "heavy lifting" is done by the WebResourceProvider class, described elsewhere at CodeProject. WebResourceProvider fetches the content from Google and offers GoogleTranslator an opportunity to parse it.

  /// <summary>
  /// Provides the derived class to parse the fetched content.
  /// </summary>
  protected override void parseContent()
  {
    m_strTranslation = "";
    string strContent = Content;
    RavSoft.StringParser  parser = new RavSoft.StringParser (strContent);
    if (parser.skipToStartOfNoCase ("<textarea name=q ")) {
        if (parser.skipToEndOf (">")) {
            bool bStatus = parser.extractToNoCase ("</textarea>", 
                                                   ref m_strTranslation);
        }
    }
  }

As you can see, the parsing logic is remarkable simple! GoogleTranslator uses the the StringParser class to extract the translated text.

Revision History

• 28 Mar 2008
  More parsing tweakage.

• 20 Mar 2007
  Tweaked parsing logic to conform to changes at Google's website.

• 15 Jan 2006
  Initial version.