Azure Translation Service

 

Picture from Alex Knight @ https://www.pexels.com/

As of today, there are no clients for Azure Translation Service, hence requests have to be made through HTTP calls. I am referencing this tutorial however, I need to make changes to the path of the URL.

1. Initialize Setup

First and foremost, I need to do the following

1. Create a resource group
2. Create Azure Cognitive Translation Services in this resource group.
3. Copy the key, endpoint, and location values as shown below.

For simplicity, I have values as environment parameters, AZURE_TRANSLATOR_KEY, AZURE_TRANSLATOR_ENDPOINT, and AZURE_TRANSLATOR_LOC.

2. Code

FYI, I am using MacOSX and Typescript.

import axios from "axios";
import { v4 } from "uuid";
import * as process from "process";

const AZURE_TRANSLATOR_KEY = process.env["AZURE_TRANSLATOR_KEY"];
const AZURE_TRANSLATOR_ENDPOINT = process.env["AZURE_TRANSLATOR_ENDPOINT"];
const AZURE_TRANSLATOR_LOC = process.env["AZURE_TRANSLATOR_LOC"];

const translate = async (text: string, lang: string): Promise<any> => {
    const headers = {
        "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key": AZURE_TRANSLATOR_KEY,
        "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Region": AZURE_TRANSLATOR_LOC,
        "Content-type": "application/json",
        "X-ClientTraceId": v4(),
    };

    return new Promise((resolve, reject) => {
        axios(`${AZURE_TRANSLATOR_ENDPOINT}translator/text/v3.0/translate`, {
            method: "POST",
            params: {
                to: lang,
            },
            headers,
            data: JSON.stringify([{ Text: text }]),
        }).then((res) => {
            if (res.status === 200) {
                resolve(res.data[0]);
            } else {
                reject(res.data);
            }
        });
    });
};

(async () => {
    console.log(await translate("hello", "ja"));
})();

output

{
  detectedLanguage: { language: 'en', score: 1 },
  translations: [ { text: 'こんにちは', to: 'ja' } ]
}

I also tested with 

console.log(await translate("The weather is good and air is fresh.", "zh"));

and got

{
  detectedLanguage: { language: 'en', score: 1 },
  translations: [ { text: '天气好，空气清新。', to: 'zh-Hans' } ]
}

3. Conclusion

All and all, easy to code in Typescript or any other programming language to make HTTPS calls. I will test with longer statements (or paragraphs) in other languages.