JavaScript: Detect Text Language With Google Translate Api (Node.js)

May 13, 2021

Enable Billing
Creating service accounts and keys (not necessary if you are using google clouds function)
Enable Cloud Translation API

Install

npm install --save @google-cloud/translate

Code

const {Translate} = require('@google-cloud/translate').v2;
const translate = new Translate();

// text could be string or array of string
async function detectLanguageGoogle(text) {
  let [detections] = await translate.detect(text);
  // enable this following code to always return array
  // detections = Array.isArray(detections) ? detections : [detections];
  return detections
}

Test

const result = await detectLanguageGoogle('What do we know so far about the Covid-19 variants?')

{
  "confidence": 1,
  "language": "en",
  "input": "What do we know so far about the Covid-19 variants?"
},

Test 2

const values = [
  'What do we know so far about the Covid-19 variants?',        // English
  "Que savons-nous jusqu'à présent des variantes du Covid-19?", // French
  "Was wissen wir bisher über die Covid-19-Varianten?",         // German
  "¿Qué sabemos hasta ahora sobre las variantes de Covid-19?",  // Spanish
  "Apa yang kita ketahui sejauh ini tentang varian Covid-19?",  // Indonesian
  "到目前为止，我们对Covid-19变体了解多少？",                        // Chinese Simplified
  "到目前為止，我們對Covid-19變體了解多少？",                        // Chinese Traditional 
  "Covid-19バリアントについてこれまでに何を知っていますか？",           // Japanese
  "हम कोविड -19 वेरिएंट के बारे में अब तक क्या जानते हैं?",                   // Hindi
  "ما الذي نعرفه حتى الآن عن بدائل Covid-19؟",                  // Arabic
  "Что мы знаем о вариантах Covid-19?"                          // Russian
]

const results = await detectLanguageGoogle(values)

[
  {
    "confidence": 1,
    "language": "en",
    "input": "What do we know so far about the Covid-19 variants?"
  },
  {
    "language": "fr",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "Que savons-nous jusqu'à présent des variantes du Covid-19?"
  },
  {
    "language": "de",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "Was wissen wir bisher über die Covid-19-Varianten?"
  },
  {
    "language": "es",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "¿Qué sabemos hasta ahora sobre las variantes de Covid-19?"
  },
  {
    "language": "id",
    "confidence": 0.8346776366233826,
    "input": "Apa yang kita ketahui sejauh ini tentang varian Covid-19?"
  },
  {
    "confidence": 1,
    "language": "zh-CN",
    "input": "到目前为止，我们对Covid-19变体了解多少？"
  },
  {
    "confidence": 1,
    "language": "zh-TW",
    "input": "到目前為止，我們對Covid-19變體了解多少？"
  },
  {
    "language": "ja",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "Covid-19バリアントについてこれまでに何を知っていますか？"
  },
  {
    "language": "hi",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "हम कोविड -19 वेरिएंट के बारे में अब तक क्या जानते हैं?"
  },
  {
    "language": "ar",
    "confidence": 1,
    "input": "ما الذي نعرفه حتى الآن عن بدائل Covid-19؟"
  },
  {
    "confidence": 1,
    "language": "ru",
    "input": "Что мы знаем о вариантах Covid-19?"
  }
]

Pricing

First 500,000 characters* per month is free ($10 monthly credit)
$20‡ per million characters (up to 1 billion characters)

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