Google translate get current language

Question

After finding zero of anything to help me online....

I am using the current function for a multi language site:

function googleTranslateElementInit() {
  new google.translate.TranslateElement({pageLanguage: 'en', includedLanguages: 'en,es',     layout: google.translate.TranslateElement.InlineLayout.SIMPLE}, 'google_translate_element');
}

However I have no idea how to get the current language once a user changes it. I'm not sure if this is even possible. Basically I want to update to Spanish images if Spanish is chosen over English. Any help would be appreciated!

Answer 1

Your not gonna believe it:

window.setInterval(function(){
     var lang = $(".goog-te-menu-value span:first").text();
     alert(lang);
},5000);

I just had to dig to find the container in Firebug and grab the value from the first span element. Hope this helps someone.

Answer 2

The currently selected language is stored in a cookie named googtrans.

Here's a simple example of grabbing the value from the cookie (based on cookie code from here: What is the shortest function for reading a cookie by name in JavaScript?):

function readCookie(name) {
    var c = document.cookie.split('; '),
    cookies = {}, i, C;

    for (i = c.length - 1; i >= 0; i--) {
        C = c[i].split('=');
        cookies[C[0]] = C[1];
     }

     return cookies[name];
}
console.log(readCookie('googtrans')); //eg. 'en/no' for Norwegian, '/en/hr' for Croatian, etc.

Answer 3

Calling google.translate.TranslateElement().c gives the code for the current language. For example, "fr" for french, "en" for english, "de" for german.

Inspecting the google.translate global object is generally informative. It's a little hard b/c Google's obviously compiled the code such that things like TranslateElement.c don't have human readable names, but with a little effort you can make sense of some of the parameters.