translate url with google translate from python script

Question

I'm trying to use google translate from a python script:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from urllib2 import urlopen
from urllib import urlencode

base_url = "http://www.google.com/translate?"
params = (('langpair','en|es'), ('u','http://asdf.com'),)
url = base_url+urlencode(params)
print "Encoded URL: %s" % url 
print urlopen(url).read()

I'm getting the error 403 when I use it.

# ./1.py 
Encoded URL: http://www.google.com/translate?langpair=en%7Ces&u=http%3A%2F%2Fasdf.com
Traceback (most recent call last):
...
urllib2.HTTPError: HTTP Error 403: Forbidden

However, the same URL works fine when accessed from browser. Could anyone spot the error? Or is it that google does not allow this type of usage?

Answer 1

If Google doesn't let you do this, you could programatically translate the normal website's source via the Google's APIs.

I wrote a function for this a little while back:

def translate(text, src = '', to = 'en'):
  parameters = ({'langpair': '{0}|{1}'.format(src, to), 'v': '1.0' })
  translated = ''

  for text in (text[index:index + 4500] for index in range(0, len(text), 4500)):
    parameters['q'] = text
    response = json.loads(urllib.request.urlopen('http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate', data = urllib.parse.urlencode(parameters).encode('utf-8')).read().decode('utf-8'))

    try:
      translated += response['responseData']['translatedText']
    except:
      pass

  return translated

Answer 2

You should be using the google API. I found and tested this code, it works:

#!/usr/bin/env python
from urllib2 import urlopen
from urllib import urlencode
import sys

lang1=sys.argv[1]
lang2=sys.argv[2]
langpair='%s|%s'%(lang1,lang2)
text=' '.join(sys.argv[3:])
base_url='http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/translate?'
params=urlencode( (('v',1.0),
                   ('q',text),
                   ('langpair',langpair),) )
url=base_url+params
content=urlopen(url).read()
start_idx=content.find('"translatedText":"')+18
translation=content[start_idx:]
end_idx=translation.find('"}, "')
translation=translation[:end_idx]
print translation

source