This entry is at request of my friend Jackie. He found there is translation of many of my articles on my blog: Franch, Chinese, German… He understood it is translated using Google Translate API, but don’t know how to do it exactly. Here is the trick (sorry for posting for too late).

Below is the script behind the scene. I am away from code for many years. The last time I touched PHP code was in 2007 (ops. The last time I touched ASP, or .NET code was in 2004).

<?php

function file_get_contents_curl($url) {

   $ch = curl_init();

   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);

   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);

   //Set curl to return the data instead of printing it to the browser.

   curl_setopt($ch, CURLOPT_URL, $url);                  $data = curl_exec($ch);

   curl_close($ch);

   return $data;

}

                              

function translate_term($term, $fromlang, $tolang) {

   $apistr = “http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&langpair=$fromlang%7C$tolang&q=” . urlencode($term);

   $dest = file_get_contents_curl($apistr);

   $json = json_decode($dest);

   return $json->responseData->translatedText;

}

function translate($src, $fromlang, $tolang) {

   $lines = split(“<br \/>”, $src);

   $rlines = array();

   foreach($lines as $line) {

      $terms = split(“\. “, $line);

      $rterms = array();

      foreach($terms as $term)

         $rterms[] = translate_term($term, $fromlang, $tolang);

      $rlines[] = implode(“. “, $rterms);

   }

   return implode(“<br />”, $rlines);

}

   

function get_body($url)   {

   $html = file_get_contents($url);

   if(preg_match(“/(<title>.*<\/title>).*<p><p>(.*)<\/p><\/p>/smi”, $html, $matches))

      return $matches[1] . $matches[2];

   return “”;

}

?>

The code above is very easy to read. Basically, the idea is to break long sentences into small chunks that Google Translator (AJAX version) can handle, and then implode them back. This is a workaround but so far I haven’t seen significant problems.

How to use it?

The function translate() can translate whatever length of text from one language, to another. A typical call would be like:

echo(translate(get_body(“../archives/$file”), “en”, $lang));

Good luck, Jackie!