Archive for July, 2010

I recently wrote a quick PHP class to do some content translation via the Google AJAX Language API, and thought it may be useful for others.

It is by no means a complete class for the API, and in fact only uses one of its methods (language.translate).

The ‘AJAX’ part of the API name is also mis-leading in this case, as we will not be sending an AJAX request or even using and Client Side code – but rather using CURL on the server side to access the API and then dedode the JSON objects using PHP.

I would recommend extending it to include some kind of file or database driven caching system if you will be using it on a high traffic site or translating entire web pages rather than just snippets. Also be sure to abide by Google’s Terms of Use

Here it is:

<?php

/**
* Translate text via the google translate API
*
* @version 1.0
* @author Chris Wheeler <chris@haydendigital.com>
* @copyright Chris Wheeler
* @date: 2010-07-15
*
* Usage:
*
* $translator = new googletranslate();
* $translator->translate('en', 'fr', 'Hello World!');
*
* Full list of supported languages is at http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxlanguage/documentation/reference.html#LangNameArray
* GOOGLE_SEARCH_API key should be defined with a valid Google Search API key for the domain
*
*/
class googletranslate {

  /**
  * POSTs the text to be translated to the API
  *
  * @return String
  */
  private function postmessage($url, $text){
    set_time_limit(30);
    $curl = curl_init();
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_URL, $url);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_HEADER, 0);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POST, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_POSTFIELDS, "q=" . urlencode($text));
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_RETURNTRANSFER, 1);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, 30);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER, FALSE);
    curl_setopt($curl, CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST, 1);
    $response = preg_split('/' . chr(10) . '/', curl_exec($curl));
    if ($error = curl_error($curl)){
      throw new Exception('CURL Error: ' . $error);
    }
    curl_close ($curl);
    return implode($response);
  }

  /**
  * Translte
  *
  * @return String
  */
  public function translate($from, $to, $text) {
    try {
      if (strlen($text) == 0) {
        throw new Exception('Empty string.');
      }
      if (strlen($text) > 5000) {
        throw new Exception('Text to be translated is too long.');
      }
      $url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?v=1.0&langpair=' . $from . '%7C' . $to . '&key=' . GOOGLE_SEARCH_APIKEY . '&userip=' . $_SERVER['REMOTE_ADDR'];
      $jsonresponse = $this->postmessage($url, $text);
      $response = json_decode($jsonresponse, true);
      if ($response['responseStatus'] == 200) {
        $responsedata = $response['responseData'];
        return $responsedata['translatedText'];
      }
    } catch (Exception $e) {
      // Handle errors if required
    }
    return false;
  }

}

?>

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