manzyuk / google-translate

Obsolete, see https://github.com/atykhonov/google-translate

NOTE: Maintenance of google-translate has been taken over by Andrey Tykhonov. Its new location is https://github.com/atykhonov/google-translate.

Emacs interface to Google Translate

Summary

Invoking the function google-translate-query-translate queries the source and target languages and text to translate, and shows a buffer with available translations of the text. The function google-translate-at-point does the same, but instead of querying you, it uses the word at point or the currently active region as text to be translated.

Installation

Assuming that the file google-translate.el is somewhere on the load path, add the following lines to your .emacs file:

(require 'google-translate)
(global-set-key "\C-ct" 'google-translate-at-point)
(global-set-key "\C-cT" 'google-translate-query-translate)

Change the key bindings to your liking.

Customization

You can customize the following variables:

• google-translate-enable-ido-completion

• google-translate-default-source-language

• google-translate-default-target-language

If google-translate-enable-ido-completion is non-NIL, the input will be read with ido-style completion.

If the variable google-translate-default-source-language is set to a non-NIL value, the source language won't be queried and that value will be used instead. Analogously, if you set the variable google-translate-default-target-language to some non-NIL value, that value will be used without querying.

You can always override this behavior by supplying a C-u prefix argument to the function google-translate-query-translate.

Here is an example. Suppose that your native language is Russian and you frequently need to translate from various languages to Russian. Then it is reasonable

• to set the variable google-translate-default-target-language to "ru", and

• to leave google-translate-default-source-language set to its default value, NIL.

In this case, the function google-translate-query-translate is only going to query the source language and text to translate. If you need to translate to some language other than Russian, you can override the default for the target language by supplying a C-u prefix argument, in which case you will be queried for both the source and target languages, as well as text to translate.

If you frequently translate from some fixed language, it is also reasonable to set google-translate-default-source-language to an appropriate value.

If you have both the default source and target languages specified, you may like to bind functions google-translate-at-point-reverse and google-translate-query-translate-reverse to some keys, e.g.:

(global-set-key (kbd "C-c r") 'google-translate-at-point-reverse)
(global-set-key (kbd "C-c R") 'google-translate-query-translate-reverse)

This will allow you to quickly translate in the reverse direction. When the default source (resp. target) language is not set, the target (resp. source) language of the reverse translation will be queried interactively.

The admitted values of google-translate-default-source-language and google-translate-default-target-language are the codes of the languages supported by Google Translate (like "ru" for Russian above). See google-translate-supported-languages for the list of the supported languages, or customize the defaults using the customization mechanism of Emacs. Setting a default language to NIL means that language will always be queried. Moreover, the variable google-translate-default-source-language can be set to a special value "auto" that is interpreted as the instruction for Google Translate to detect the source language. This option is also available when you are queried for the source language: simply leave this parameter blank by pressing RET. (If you have enabled the ido-style completion, "Detect language" is going to be the first option, which you can select simply by hitting RET.)

The variable google-translate-show-phonetic controls whether the phonetic spelling of the original text and its translation is displayed if available. If you want to see the phonetics, set this variable to T.

There are also three faces you can customize:

• google-translate-text-face, used to display the original text (defaults to default)

• google-translate-phonetic-face, used to display the phonetics (defaults to shadow)

• google-translate-translation-face, used to display the highest ranking translation (defaults to default with the weight attribute set to bold)

For example, to show the translation in a larger font change the height attribute of the face google-translate-translation-face like so:

(set-face-attribute 'google-translate-translation-face nil :height 1.4)