Does Google Translate API support placeholders?

Question

Let's say I have a tweet I'll like to translate through the google api.

Text: #sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos Fiesta aquí 😎 @my_friend

I'm sending the following to the API endpoint https://www.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2:

{1 /} {2 /} {3 /} {4 /} {5 /} Fiesta aquí 😎 {0 /}

This is the response:

{1} {2} {3}} {4} {5}} party over here {0}

This is not what I expected. However, I would like to put in placeholders otherwise the actual hashtags get translated and that doesn't point to the same results as the original tweet.

There's no mention of placeholders on the API docs, so I guess I'm not too surprised that it failed. Maybe they aren't supported. The only thing I've found is this and I'm not sure that it's related.

Is there a documented way to get this working ?

Answer 1

I just tried the Google Translate API with the text containing the hashtags and the Translate API seems to be already taking care of the hashtags as well as @ mentions. It does not translate any of the hashtags or the @ mentions.

Example

$ echo '{q: ["#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos Fiesta aquí 😎 @my_friend"], source: "es", target: "en" }' | http --print=bB POST 'https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2?key=MY_API_KEY'

{
    q: ["#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos Fiesta aquí 😎 @my_friend"],
    source: "es",
    target: "en"
}


{
    "data": {
        "translations": [
            {
                "translatedText": "#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos Party here 😎 @my_friend"
            }
        ]
    }
}

Skip translation for a portion of the text

If you want a piece of text to not be translated you can enclose it within <span class="notranslate">CONTENT_NOT_TO_BE_TRANSLATED</span>. You should then be able to replace all such span blocks in the result with just the content within using some simple regex pattern replace operation.

$ echo '{q: ["#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos <span class=\"notranslate\">Fiesta</span> aquí 😎   @my_friend"], source: "es", target: "en" }' | http --print=bB POST 'https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2?key=MY_API_KEY'

{
    q: ["#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos <span class=\"notranslate\">Fiesta</span> aquí 😎   @my_friend"],
    source: "es",
    target: "en"
}


{
    "data": {
        "translations": [
            {
                "#sf #fiesta #verano #baile #vamos <span class=\"notranslate\">Fiesta</span> here 😎 @my_friend"
            }
        ]
    }
}