Glosbe translate

Wrapper around the Glosbe online multilingual dictionary. Translate and get definitions of words between languages.

See a full list of supported languages.

Add this line to your application's Gemfile:

gem 'glosbe-translate'

And then execute:

$ bundle

Or install it yourself as:

$ gem install glosbe-translate

All translations and definitions take the ISO-639 languages codes as to and from in either the two or three character versions. Glosbe supports a long list of languages.

Class methods on the language object that allow you to do a single lookup:

Glosbe::Language.translate("please", from: :en, to: :nl)
=> "alstublieft"

Fetch an array of definitions in the from language:

Glosbe::Language.define("pineapple", from: :en, to: :fr)
=> ["fruit",
 "Large sweet fleshy tropical fruit with a terminal tuft of stiff leaves.",
 "plant"]

Fetch an array of definitions in the to language:

Glosbe::Language.translated_define("pie", from: :en, to: :fr)
=> ["Plat constitué de viandes, fruits ou autres nourriture cuits dans ou sur une pâte.",
 "Plat, préparation à base de pâte aplatie au rouleau, et d’une garniture salée ou sucrée"]

Any of the three above methods can also use the simpler key value pair of from: :to languages:

Glosbe::Language.translate("fromage", fr: :en)
=> "cheese"

Translations and definitions are done from a Language object:

language = Glosbe::Language.new(from: "eng", to: "nld")

Symbols and strings are accepted, and the language code will be converted to match what is expected by the API.

The same three methods are available to translate and define a phrase using this object:

language.translate("please")
=> "alstublieft"

language.define("pineapple")
=> ["fruit",
 "Large sweet fleshy tropical fruit with a terminal tuft of stiff leaves.",
 "plant"]

language.translated_define("pie")
=> ["Plat constitué de viandes, fruits ou autres nourriture cuits dans ou sur une pâte.",
 "Plat, préparation à base de pâte aplatie au rouleau, et d’une garniture salée ou sucrée"]

Doing a lookup will return a Response object:

response = language.lookup("coffee")

The response represents all the fields returned from the API in a very similar structure.

Was the HTTP a 200 OK?

response.success?
=> true

Were any results returned?

response.found?
=> true

Fields in the response are directly mapped for convenience:

response.from
=> "en"
response.to
=> "nl"
response.phrase
=> "coffee"

There can sometimes a message returned from the server. This is particularly interesting for rate limiting warnings:

response.message
=> "Too many queries, your IP has been blocked"

Convenience methods extract the same three functions and return values repeated above:

response.translation
response.define
response.translated_define

The raw results matching the structure of the API are available here.

The list of all results is available from a response:

response.results
=> [...]

Each result object has the translated phrase if present;

result.phrase
=> "koffie"

The result then lists its authors:

result.authors
=> [...]

And its meanings:

result.meanings
=> [...]

Each meaning has language and text:

meaning.text
=> "Een drank bekomen door infusie van de bonen van de koffieplant in heet water."
meaning.language
=> "nl"

None of these fields are guaranteed to exist. Though they will return a string or nil for value fields, and will always return an empty array for collection fields.

Logging is defaulted to nil, but can be passed any Logger object to debug network requests.

Glosbe.logger = Logger.new("glosbe.log")
Glosbe.logger = Rails.logger

After checking out the repo, run bin/setup to install dependencies. Then, run rake spec to run the tests. You can also run bin/console for an interactive prompt that will allow you to experiment.

To install this gem onto your local machine, run bundle exec rake install.

Bug reports and pull requests are welcome on GitHub at https://github.com/kmcphillips/glosbe-translate.

Come talk to me about what you're working on. I'd love to review PRs if you find bugs or think of improvements.

The gem is available as open source under the terms of the MIT License.