I have extended my xgoogle library with a Python module for Google Translate.

The new module is called "xgoogle.translate" and it implements two classes - "Translator" and "LanguageDetector".

The "Translator" class can be used to translate text. It provides a function called "translate" that takes three arguments - "message", "lang_from" and "lang_to". It returns the translated text as a Unicode string. Don't forget to encode it to the right encoding before outputting, otherwise you'll get errors such as "UnicodeEncodeError: 'latin-1' codec can't encode characters in position 0-3: ordinal not in range(256)"

Here is an example usage of the "Translator" class:

>>> from xgoogle.translate import Translator >>> >>> translate = Translator().translate >>> >>> print translate("Ich liebe Katzen", lang_to="en") I love cats >>> >>> print translate("I love cats", lang_to="es").encode('utf-8') Amo a los gatos >>> >>> print translate("Amo a los gatos") I love cats

If "lang_from" is not given, Google's translation service auto-detects it. If "lang_to" is not given, it defaults to "en" (English).

In case of an error, the "translate" function throws "TranslationError" exception with a message why the translation failed. It's best to wrap calls to "translate" in a try/except block:

Program: >>> from xgoogle.translate import Translator, TranslationError >>> >>> try: >>> translate = Translator().translate >>> print translate("") >>> except TranslationError, e: >>> print e Output: Failed translating: invalid text

The "LanguageDetector" class can be used to detect the language of the text. It contains a function called "detect".

The "detect" function takes only one argument - message - the piece of text you to detect language of.

It returns a "Language" object that has four properties:

lang_code - two letter language code for the given language. For example "es" for Spanish.

- two letter language code for the given language. For example "es" for Spanish. lang - the name of the language. For example, "Spanish".

- the name of the language. For example, "Spanish". confidence - the confidence level from 0.0 to 1.0 that describes how confident the detector was about the language of the given text.

- the confidence level from 0.0 to 1.0 that describes how confident the detector was about the language of the given text. is_reliable - was the detection reliable.

Here is an example of "LanguageDetector":

>>> from xgoogle.translate import LanguageDetector, DetectionError >>> >>> detect = LanguageDetector().detect >>> english = detect("This is a wonderful library.") >>> english.lang_code 'en' >>> english.lang 'English' >>> english.confidence 0.28078437000000001 >>> english.is_reliable True

In case of a failure "detect" raises a "DetectionError" exception.

These two classes interact with the Google Ajax Language API to do their job. Since this Ajax service returns JSON string, you'll need to install simplejson Python module. It should be as easy as typing "easy_install simplejson".

Download xgoogle Library

Download link: catonmat.net/ftp/xgoogle.zip

Next, I'll post this library to pypi. See you!