I got all excited today when my favorite podcasters, the Java Posse announced in episode #148 that Google had released an API for their translate service.
I've had my own implementation going on for several months now, and I was all ready to post that I was going to discontinue my Google Translate Scraper. Who wants to use a scraper when you've got a real robust interface, right?
Then I looked at the code, and there is no way this is an official Google API, because it's nothing more than a two class scraper that's far more immature than my own implementation.
A couple of key differences between this one and mine. MIne has some basic test coverage, this one doesn't. My implementation will throw a TranslationException if you try to send more data than Google will process (you can't just send them an arbitrary amount of text). My implementation includes a real XML parser so if Google radically changes their HTML structure I can can still parse it cleanly.
So for now I'll keep my project going, hopefully one day Google really will release an API for their translate service.
Tuesday, October 30, 2007
A Google Translate API?
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