Translate Shell
Translate Shell (formerly Google Translate CLI) is a command-line translator powered by Google Translate (default), Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate, DeepL Translator and Apertium. 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
- FreeBSD
- Windows (Cygwin or MSYS2)
Dependencies
- GNU Awk (gawk) 4.0 or later
- This program relies heavily on GNU extensions of the AWK language, 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.
- GNU Bash or Zsh
- 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:
- curl with OpenSSL support
- GNU FriBidi: an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi)
- required for displaying text in Right-to-Left scripts (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew)
- mplayer, mpv, mpg123, or eSpeak
- required for the Text-to-Speech functionality
- less, more or most
- required for terminal paging
- rlwrap: a GNU readline wrapper
- required for readline-style editing and history in the interactive shell
- aspell or hunspell
- 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 git.io/translate) -- -shell
(in fish)
$ gawk -f (curl -Ls git.io/translate | psub) -- -shell
Installation
Option #1. Direct Download
Download the self-contained executable and place it into your path. It's everything you need.
$ wget git.io/trans
$ chmod +x ./trans
There is a GPG signature.
Option #2. From A Package Manager
Antigen (Recommended for Zsh users)
UsingAdd the following line to your .zshrc
:
antigen bundle soimort/translate-shell
Using your favorite package manager
See wiki: Distros on how to install from a specific package manager on your distro.
Option #3. From Git (Recommended for seasoned hackers)
$ 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
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"
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 wiki: Languages 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
Right-to-Left (RTL) languages are well supported via GNU FriBidi.
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 wiki: Languages 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 URI scheme (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 -list
(-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 wiki: REPL for more advanced usage of the interactive Translate Shell.
Usage
For more details on command-line options, see the man page trans(1) or use trans -M
in a terminal.
Usage: trans [OPTIONS] [SOURCE]:[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 and exit.
-R, -reference-english
Print reference table of languages (in English names) and exit.
-L CODES, -list CODES
Print details of languages and exit.
-S, -list-engines
List available translation engines 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.
-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
Do not view the translation in a terminal pager.
-browser PROGRAM
Specify the web browser to use.
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.
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:
-l CODE, -hl CODE, -lang CODE
Specify your home language.
-s CODE, -sl CODE, -source CODE, -from CODE
Specify the source language.
-t CODES, -tl CODE, -target CODES, -to CODES
Specify the target language(s), joined by '+'.
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 wiki: Languages.
Language | Code | Language | Code | Language | Code |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
Afrikaans Afrikaans |
af |
Hebrew עִבְרִית |
he |
Portuguese Português |
pt |
Albanian Shqip |
sq |
Hill Mari Кырык мары |
mrj |
Punjabi ਪੰਜਾਬੀ |
pa |
Amharic አማርኛ |
am |
Hindi हिन्दी |
hi |
Querétaro Otomi Hñąñho |
otq |
Arabic العربية |
ar |
Hmong Hmoob |
hmn |
Romanian Română |
ro |
Armenian Հայերեն |
hy |
Hmong Daw Hmoob Daw |
mww |
Russian Русский |
ru |
Azerbaijani Azərbaycanca |
az |
Hungarian Magyar |
hu |
Samoan Gagana Sāmoa |
sm |
Bashkir башҡорт теле |
ba |
Icelandic Íslenska |
is |
Scots Gaelic Gàidhlig |
gd |
Basque Euskara |
eu |
Igbo Igbo |
ig |
Serbian (Cyrillic) српски |
sr-Cyrl |
Belarusian беларуская |
be |
Indonesian Bahasa Indonesia |
id |
Serbian (Latin) srpski |
sr-Latn |
Bengali বাংলা |
bn |
Irish Gaeilge |
ga |
Sesotho Sesotho |
st |
Bosnian Bosanski |
bs |
Italian Italiano |
it |
Shona chiShona |
sn |
Bulgarian български |
bg |
Japanese 日本語 |
ja |
Sindhi سنڌي |
sd |
Cantonese 粵語 |
yue |
Javanese Basa Jawa |
jv |
Sinhala සිංහල |
si |
Catalan Català |
ca |
Kannada ಕನ್ನಡ |
kn |
Slovak Slovenčina |
sk |
Cebuano Cebuano |
ceb |
Kazakh Қазақ тілі |
kk |
Slovenian Slovenščina |
sl |
Chichewa Nyanja |
ny |
Khmer ភាសាខ្មែរ |
km |
Somali Soomaali |
so |
Chinese Simplified 简体中文 |
zh-CN |
Klingon tlhIngan Hol |
tlh |
Spanish Español |
es |
Chinese Traditional 正體中文 |
zh-TW |
Klingon (pIqaD) |
tlh-Qaak |
Sundanese Basa Sunda |
su |
Corsican Corsu |
co |
Korean 한국어 |
ko |
Swahili Kiswahili |
sw |
Croatian Hrvatski |
hr |
Kurdish Kurdî |
ku |
Swedish Svenska |
sv |
Czech Čeština |
cs |
Kyrgyz Кыргызча |
ky |
Tahitian Reo Tahiti |
ty |
Danish Dansk |
da |
Lao ລາວ |
lo |
Tajik Тоҷикӣ |
tg |
Dutch Nederlands |
nl |
Latin Latina |
la |
Tamil தமிழ் |
ta |
Eastern Mari Олык марий |
mhr |
Latvian Latviešu |
lv |
Tatar татарча |
tt |
Emoji Emoji |
emj |
Lithuanian Lietuvių |
lt |
Telugu తెలుగు |
te |
English English |
en |
Luxembourgish Lëtzebuergesch |
lb |
Thai ไทย |
th |
Esperanto Esperanto |
eo |
Macedonian Македонски |
mk |
Tongan Lea faka-Tonga |
to |
Estonian Eesti |
et |
Malagasy Malagasy |
mg |
Turkish Türkçe |
tr |
Fijian Vosa Vakaviti |
fj |
Malay Bahasa Melayu |
ms |
Udmurt удмурт |
udm |
Filipino Tagalog |
tl |
Malayalam മലയാളം |
ml |
Ukrainian Українська |
uk |
Finnish Suomi |
fi |
Maltese Malti |
mt |
Urdu اُردُو |
ur |
French Français |
fr |
Maori Māori |
mi |
Uzbek Oʻzbek tili |
uz |
Frisian Frysk |
fy |
Marathi मराठी |
mr |
Vietnamese Tiếng Việt |
vi |
Galician Galego |
gl |
Mongolian Монгол |
mn |
Welsh Cymraeg |
cy |
Georgian ქართული |
ka |
Myanmar မြန်မာစာ |
my |
Xhosa isiXhosa |
xh |
German Deutsch |
de |
Nepali नेपाली |
ne |
Yiddish ייִדיש |
yi |
Greek Ελληνικά |
el |
Norwegian Norsk |
no |
Yoruba Yorùbá |
yo |
Gujarati ગુજરાતી |
gu |
Papiamento Papiamentu |
pap |
Yucatec Maya Màaya T'àan |
yua |
Haitian Creole Kreyòl Ayisyen |
ht |
Pashto پښتو |
ps |
Zulu isiZulu |
zu |
Hausa Hausa |
ha |
Persian فارسی |
fa |
||
Hawaiian ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi |
haw |
Polish Polski |
pl |
Wiki
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 guidelines for contributing before reporting an issue or sending a pull request.
Licensing
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. See LICENSE and WAIVER for details.