Google Translator is a great translator tool which has a very simple AJAX API that can be easily used from mobile apps. Compared to other translator tools it has one feature which other services don’t have, the auto detection of language.
The API is really easy to use. All you need to do is to pass three parameters to the API call:
- Version, v=1.0
- Translated text, q=Hei maailma!
- Language pair (if source is empty then language is automatically identified), langpair=|en
In the end you end up with the following URL:
http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&langpair=|en&q=Hei+maailma!
And if you click the link you’ll see that it returns the translated text in JSON format which is pretty easy to parse.
{ "responseData": {
"translatedText":"Hello world!",
"detectedSourceLanguage":"fi" },
"responseDetails": null,
"responseStatus": 200}
This made it pretty easy to integrate the API call to Twim. So now in Twim 1.6 you can select a tweet from status list and select “Translate to English” from status menu and Twim will display the translation to you in seconds. Pretty handy if you are following people from other countries in Twitter. Go ahead and download the latest Twim to your mobile phone from here.
…and by the way, new feature also has the “paging” feature for home screen and search results as a bonus! Happy Twittering!
