GitHub - soimort/translate-shell: :speech_balloon: Command-line translator using Google Translate, Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate, etc.
(formerly Google Translate CLI) is a command-line translator powered by
(default),
,
, and
. It gives you easy access to one of these translation engines in your terminal:
$ trans 'Saluton, Mondo!' Saluton, Mondo! Hello, World! Translations of Saluton, Mondo! [ Esperanto -> English ] Saluton , Hello, Mondo ! World! By default, translations with detailed explanations are shown. You can also translate the text briefly: (only the most relevant translation will be shown)
$ trans -brief 'Saluton, Mondo!' Hello, World! Translate Shell can also be used like an interactive shell; input the text to be translated line by line:
$ trans -shell -brief > Rien ne réussit comme le succès. Nothing succeeds like success. > Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker. What does not kill me makes me stronger. > Юмор есть остроумие глубокого чувства. Humor has a deep sense of wit. > 學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。 Learning without thought is labor lost, thought without learning is perilous. > 幸福になるためには、人から愛されるのが一番の近道。 In order to be happy, the best way is to be loved by people. Prerequisites
System Requirements
Translate Shell is known to work on many POSIX-compliant systems, including but not limited to:
GNU/Linux
macOS
*BSD
Android (through Termux)
Windows (through WSL, Cygwin, or MSYS2)
Dependencies
(gawk) 4.0 or laterThis program relies heavily on GNU extensions of the
, which are non-portable for other AWK implementations (e.g. nawk).
How to get gawk: gawk comes with all GNU/Linux distributions.
On FreeBSD, gawk is available in the ports.
On macOS, gawk is available in MacPorts and Homebrew.
Please note that gawk 5.2.0 has a
-- update to gawk 5.2.1 instead.
or
You may use Translate Shell from any Unix shell of your choice (bash, zsh, ksh, tcsh, fish, etc.); however, the wrapper script requires either bash or zsh installed.
Recommended Dependencies
These dependencies are optional, but strongly recommended for full functionality:
with OpenSSL support
: an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi)required for displaying text in Right-to-Left scripts (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew)
,
,
, or
required for the Text-to-Speech functionality
,
or
required for terminal paging
: a GNU readline wrapperrequired for readline-style editing and history in the interactive shell
or
required for spell checking
Environment and Fonts
It is a must to have corresponding fonts for the language(s) / script(s) you wish to display in your terminal. See
wiki: Writing Systems and Fonts
for more details on scripts and recommended Unicode fonts.
Try It Out!
Start an interactive shell and translate anything you input into your native language: (in bash or zsh)
$ gawk -f <(curl -Ls --compressed https://git.io/translate) -- -shell (in fish)
$ gawk -f (curl -Ls --compressed https://git.io/translate | psub) -- -shell Using Docker
To try out via
, run:
$ docker pull soimort/translate-shell Then you may start an interactive shell from the Docker image for translating:
$ docker run -it soimort/translate-shell -shell Installation
Option #1. Direct Download
Download
and place it into your path. It's everything you need.
$ wget git.io/trans $ chmod +x ./trans There is a
.
Option #2. From A Package Manager
Using your favorite package manager
See
on how to install from a specific package manager on your distro.
Using
(for Zsh users)
Add the following line to your .zshrc:
antigen bundle soimort/translate-shell@develop Option #3. From Git
$ git clone https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell $ cd translate-shell/ $ make $ [sudo] make install In case you have only zsh but not bash in your system, build with:
$ make TARGET=zsh The default PREFIX of installation is /usr/local. To install the program to somewhere else (e.g. /usr, ~/.local), use:
$ [sudo] make PREFIX=/usr install Getting Started by Examples
Translate a Word
From any language to your language
Google Translate can identify the language of the source text automatically, and Translate Shell by default translates the source text into the language of your locale.
$ trans vorto From any language to one or more specific languages
Translate a word into French:
$ trans :fr word Translate a word into Chinese and Japanese: (use a plus sign "+" as the delimiter)
$ trans :zh+ja word Alternatively, equals sign ("=") can be used in place of the colon (":"). Note that in some shells (e.g. zsh), equals signs may be interpreted differently, therefore the argument specifying languages needs to be protected:
$ trans {=zh+ja} word $ trans '=zh+ja' word You can also use the -target (-t) option to specify the target language(s):
$ trans -t zh+ja word With the -t option, the name of the language may also be used instead of the language code:
$ trans -t japanese word $ trans -t 日本語 word From a specific language
Google Translate may wrongly identify the source text as some other language than you expected:
$ trans 手紙 In that case, you need to specify its language explicitly:
$ trans ja: 手紙 $ trans zh: 手紙 You can also use the -source (-s) option to specify the source language:
$ trans -s ja 手紙 Translate Multiple Words or a Phrase
Translate each word alone:
$ trans en:zh word processor Put words into one argument, and translate them as a whole:
$ trans en:zh "word processor" Translate a Sentence
Translating a sentence is much the same like translating a phrase; you can just quote the sentence into one argument:
$ trans :zh "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow," $ trans :zh 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,' It is also possible to translate multi-line sentences:
$ trans :zh "Creeps in this petty pace from day to day, > To the last syllable of recorded time; > And all our yesterdays have lighted fools > The way to dusty death." To avoid punctuation marks (e.g. "!") or other special characters being interpreted by the shell, use single quotes:
$ trans :zh 'Out, out, brief candle!' There are some cases though, you may still want to use double quotes: (e.g. the sentence contains a single quotation mark "'")
$ trans :zh "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player" Alternatively, use the -join-sentence (-j) option to treat all arguments as one sentence so that quotes can be omitted:
$ trans -j :zh Life\'s but a walking shadow, a poor player Brief Mode
By default, Translate Shell displays translations in a verbose manner. If you prefer to see only the most relevant translation, there is a brief mode available using the -brief (-b) option:
$ trans -b :fr "Saluton, Mondo" In brief mode, phonetic notation (if any) is not shown by default. To enable this, put an at sign "@" in front of the language code:
$ trans -b :@ja "Saluton, Mondo" Dictionary Mode
Google Translate can be used as a dictionary. When translating a word and the target language is the same as the source language, the dictionary entry of the word is shown:
$ trans :en word To enable dictionary mode no matter whether the source language and the target language are identical, use the -dictionary (-d) option.
$ trans -d fr: mot Note: Not every language supported by Google Translate has provided dictionary data. See
to find out which language(s) has dictionary support.
Language Identification
Use the -identify (-id) option to identify the language of the text:
$ trans -id 言葉 Text-to-Speech
Use the -play (-p) option to listen to the translation:
$ trans -b -p :ja "Saluton, Mondo" Use the -speak (-sp) option to listen to the original text:
$ trans -sp "你好，世界" Terminal Paging
Sometimes the content of translation can be too much for display in one screen. Use the -view (-v) option to view the translation in a terminal pager such as less or more:
$ trans -d -v word Right-to-Left (RTL) Languages
are well supported via
.
The program will automatically adjust the screen width for padding when displaying right-to-left languages. Alternatively, you may use the -width (-w) option to specify the screen width:
$ trans -b -w 40 :he "Saluton, Mondo" See
to find out which language(s) uses a Right-to-Left writing system.
Pipeline, Input and Output
If no source text is given in command-line arguments, the program will read from standard input, or from the file specified by the -input (-i) option:
$ echo "Saluton, Mondo" | trans -b :fr $ trans -b -i input.txt :fr Translations are written to standard output, or to the file specified by the -output (-o) option:
$ echo "Saluton, Mondo" | trans -b -o output.txt :fr Translate a File
Instead of using the -input option, a
(file:// followed by the file name) can be used as a command-line argument:
$ trans :fr file://input.txt Note: Brief mode is used when translating from file URI schemes.
Translate a Web Page
To translate a web page, an http(s) URI scheme can be used as an argument:
$ trans :fr http://www.w3.org/ A browser session will open for viewing the translation (via Google Translate's web interface). To specify your web browser of choice, use the -browser option:
$ trans -browser firefox :fr http://www.w3.org/ Language Details
Use the -linguist (-L) option to view details of one or more languages:
$ trans -L fr $ trans -L de+en Some basic information of the language will be displayed: its English name and endonym (language name in the language itself), language family, writing system, canonical Google Translate code and ISO 639-3 code.
Interactive Translate Shell (REPL)
Start an interactive shell using the -shell (or -interactive, -I) option:
$ trans -shell You may specify the source language and the target language(s) before starting an interactive shell:
$ trans -shell en:fr You may also change these settings during an interactive session. See
for more advanced usage of the interactive Translate Shell.
Usage
For more details on command-line options, see the man page
or use trans -M in a terminal.
Usage: trans [OPTIONS] [SOURCES]:[TARGETS] [TEXT]... Information options: -V, -version Print version and exit. -H, -help Print help message and exit. -M, -man Show man page and exit. -T, -reference Print reference table of languages (in endonyms) and codes, and exit. -R, -reference-english Print reference table of languages (in English names) and codes, and exit. -S, -list-engines List available translation engines and exit. -list-languages List all languages (in endonyms) and exit. -list-languages-english List all languages (in English names) and exit. -list-codes List all codes and exit. -list-all List all languages (endonyms and English names) and codes, and exit. -L CODES, -linguist CODES Print details of languages and exit. -U, -upgrade Check for upgrade of this program. Translator options: -e ENGINE, -engine ENGINE Specify the translation engine to use. Display options: -verbose Verbose mode. (default) -b, -brief Brief mode. -d, -dictionary Dictionary mode. -identify Language identification. -show-original Y/n Show original text or not. -show-original-phonetics Y/n Show phonetic notation of original text or not. -show-translation Y/n Show translation or not. -show-translation-phonetics Y/n Show phonetic notation of translation or not. -show-prompt-message Y/n Show prompt message or not. -show-languages Y/n Show source and target languages or not. -show-original-dictionary y/N Show dictionary entry of original text or not. -show-dictionary Y/n Show dictionary entry of translation or not. -show-alternatives Y/n Show alternative translations or not. -w NUM, -width NUM Specify the screen width for padding. -indent NUM Specify the size of indent (number of spaces). -theme FILENAME Specify the theme to use. -no-theme Do not use any other theme than default. -no-ansi Do not use ANSI escape codes. -no-autocorrect Do not autocorrect. (if defaulted by the translation engine) -no-bidi Do not convert bidirectional texts. -bidi Always convert bidirectional texts. -no-warn Do not write warning messages to stderr. -dump Print raw API response instead. Audio options: -p, -play Listen to the translation. -speak Listen to the original text. -n VOICE, -narrator VOICE Specify the narrator, and listen to the translation. -player PROGRAM Specify the audio player to use, and listen to the translation. -no-play Do not listen to the translation. -no-translate Do not translate anything when using -speak. -download-audio Download the audio to the current directory. -download-audio-as FILENAME Download the audio to the specified file. Terminal paging and browsing options: -v, -view View the translation in a terminal pager. -pager PROGRAM Specify the terminal pager to use, and view the translation. -no-view, -no-pager Do not view the translation in a terminal pager. -browser PROGRAM Specify the web browser to use. -no-browser Do not open the web browser. Networking options: -x HOST:PORT, -proxy HOST:PORT Use HTTP proxy on given port. -u STRING, -user-agent STRING Specify the User-Agent to identify as. -4, -ipv4, -inet4-only Connect only to IPv4 addresses. -6, -ipv6, -inet6-only Connect only to IPv6 addresses. Interactive shell options: -I, -interactive, -shell Start an interactive shell. -E, -emacs Start the GNU Emacs front-end for an interactive shell. -no-rlwrap Do not invoke rlwrap when starting an interactive shell. I/O options: -i FILENAME, -input FILENAME Specify the input file. -o FILENAME, -output FILENAME Specify the output file. Language preference options: -hl CODE, -host CODE Specify the host (interface) language. -s CODES, -sl CODES, -source CODES, -from CODES Specify the source language(s), joined by '+'. -t CODES, -tl CODES, -target CODES, -to CODES Specify the target language(s), joined by '+'. Text preprocessing options: -j, -join-sentence Treat all arguments as one single sentence. Other options: -no-init Do not load any initialization script. See the man page trans(1) for more information. Code List
Use trans -R or trans -T to view the reference table in a terminal.
For more details on languages and corresponding codes, see
.
LanguageCodeLanguageCodeLanguageCode
Afrikaansaf
עִבְרִיתhe
Português Brasileiropt-BR
Shqipsq
Кырык марыmrj
Português Europeupt-PT
አማርኛam
हिन्दीhi
ਪੰਜਾਬੀpa
العربيةar
Hmoobhmn
Runasimiqu
Հայերենhy
Magyarhu
Hñąñhootq
অসমীয়াas
Íslenskais
Românăro
Aymar aruay
Igboig
Rumantschrm
Azərbaycancaaz
Ilokanoilo
Русскийru
Bamanankanbm
Bahasa Indonesiaid
Gagana Sāmoasm
Башҡортсаba
Interlingueie
संस्कृतम्sa
Euskaraeu
Inuinnaqtunikt
Gàidhliggd
беларускаяbe
ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦiu
Sepedinso
বাংলাbn
Inuktitutiu-Latn
Српскиsr-Cyrl
भोजपुरीbho
Gaeilgega
Srpskisr-Latn
Bosanskibs
Italianoit
Sesothost
Brezhonegbr
日本語ja
Setswanatn
българскиbg
Basa Jawajv
chiShonasn
粵語yue
ಕನ್ನಡkn
سنڌيsd
Catalàca
Қазақ тіліkk
සිංහලsi
Cebuanoceb
ភាសាខ្មែរkm
Slovenčinask
ᏣᎳᎩchr
Ikinyarwandarw
Slovenščinasl
Nyanjany
tlhIngan Holtlh-Latn
Soomaaliso
文言lzh
कोंकणीgom
Españoles
简体中文zh-CN
한국어ko
Basa Sundasu
繁體中文zh-TW
Kriokri
Kiswahilisw
Чӑвашлаcv
سۆرانیckb
Svenskasv
Corsuco
Kurmancîku
Reo Tahitity
Hrvatskihr
Кыргызчаky
Тоҷикӣtg
Češtinacs
ລາວlo
தமிழ்ta
Danskda
Latinala
татарчаtt
دریprs
Latviešulv
తెలుగుte
ދިވެހިdv
Lingálaln
ไทยth
डोगरीdoi
Lietuviųlt
བོད་ཡིགbo
Nederlandsnl
Lugandalg
ትግርኛti
རྫོང་ཁdz
Lëtzebuergeschlb
Lea faka-Tongato
Олык марийmhr
Македонскиmk
Xitsongats
Englishen
मैथिलीmai
Türkçetr
Esperantoeo
Malagasymg
Türkmentk
Eestiet
Bahasa Melayums
Twitw
Eʋegbeee
മലയാളംml
Удмуртudm
Føroysktfo
Maltimt
Українськаuk
Vosa Vakavitifj
Māorimi
Hornjoserbšćinahsb
Filipinotl
मराठीmr
اُردُوur
Suomifi
ꯃꯤꯇꯩꯂꯣꯟmni-Mtei
ئۇيغۇر تىلىug
Françaisfr
Mizo ṭawnglus
Oʻzbek tiliuz
Français canadienfr-CA
Монголmn
Tiếng Việtvi
Fryskfy
ᠮᠣᠩᠭᠣᠯmn-Mong
Volapükvo
Galegogl
မြန်မာစာmy
Cymraegcy
ქართულიka
नेपालीne
Wollofwo
Deutschde
Norskno
isiXhosaxh
Ελληνικάel
Occitanoc
Sakhasah
Kalaallisutkl
ଓଡ଼ିଆor
ייִדישyi
Avañe'ẽgn
Afaan Oromooom
Yorùbáyo
ગુજરાતીgu
Papiamentupap
Màaya T'àanyua
Kreyòl Ayisyenht
پښتوps
isiZuluzu
Hausaha
فارسیfa
ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻihaw
PolskiplWiki
Lists of all languages, writing systems and fonts for reference:
The following pages demonstrate the advanced usage of Translate Shell:
Find out whether your Linux distribution has included Translate Shell in its official repository. If not, contribute one:
Frequently Asked Questions, historical stuff, AWK coding style, etc.:
Reporting Bugs / Contributing
Please review the
before reporting an issue or sending a pull request.
Licensing
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. See
and
for details.