Install Translate Shell
Translate Shell can be installed in three ways.
Method1 – Using Package manager
Translate Shell is available in the official repositories of popular Linux operating systems.
On Arch Linux and derivatives:
On Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint:
On Fedora:
If it is not available in the official repositories, you can install it as described in any one of the following two methods.
Method2 – Direct download
Download the self-contained executable file, make it as executable. move it to your $PATH and start using it.
Method3 – Install from source
Clone Translate Shell git repository, compile and install it as shown below.
Use Google Translate From Commandline In Linux using “Translate Shell”
1. Translate a word/sentence
To translate a word, just type:
Sample output:
As you see in the above output, I have translated a Tamil word called “வணக்கம்” (Vanakkam), which is used to greet people, to English. By default, Translate Shell will translate the given words/sentences to English.
To translate a whole sentence at once, Just type ‘trans’ command followed by the sentence within quotes like below.
Sample output:
As you see in the above example, Translate Shell gives you the detailed translation of the given sentence.
When translating a sentence, put them inside quotes. If you don’t put them inside the quotes, each word in the sentence will be translated alone like below.
To get the brief translation of the given sentence, type the sentence with -briefparameter as shown below.
The sample output would be:
This above command will just display the actual translation.
2. Translate the contents of a file
I want to translate a whole text file to English, is it possible? Yes you can!
Let us see the contents of text file
Here is what I have in the text file.
To translate this text file, just type:
Sample output:
Cool isn’t it?
3. Find language codes
As you know already, Google translate supports over 100 languages. So it is important to know the language codes to translate sentences to other languages.
To display the language codes, type:
Sample output:
Language codes
Just pick any language of your choice and translate the sentence instantly. You don’t need a web browser. Everything will be displayed right from your Terminal.
4. Translate to one or more languages
As you noticed, all the translations that we have done so far are from other languages (Tamil in my case) to English. If you want to change the target language, type :(colon)followed by specific language code.
Say for example, to translate a word to Hindi, just type:
This command will translate the Tamil word “வணக்கம்” to Hindi language.
Sample output:
We can also translate words to multiple languages in one go. To do so, use use a plus sign “+” as the delimiter. For instance, the following command will translate the given word to Hindi and Telugu.
Alternatively, you can use -t option (instead of colon) to specify the target language(s). This command translates the given word to Hindi, Telugu and Kannada.
To translate a sentence to multiple languages, quote the sentence like one argument as shown below.
Or, use -t option.
5. Translate from a specific language
Sometimes, Google translate may wrongly identify the source text as some other language than you expected. In such cases, you need to specify the source language explicitly like below.
Please mind that you must put the colon after the language code, not before. If you put the colon before language, it will be recognized as target language.
Alternatively, just use -s option (instead of colon) to specify the source language as shown below.
6. Interactive Translation
Translate Shell can also be used as interactive translator. That means you can translate line by line interactively.
To do so, use -shell option like below.
Press Ctrl+c to quit the interactive translation.
7. Translate a website
What about translating a website? That’s also possible.
This command will open a new browser window and translate the website into English. Since the above website is already in English, It just displayed:
To translate ostechnix.com site to some other language, for example Tamil, just type:
Translate a website from command line
8. Dictionary mode
Google translate can also be used as a dictionary. To know the meaning of a given word, run:
To enable dictionary mode no matter whether the source language and the target language are identical, use the -d option like below.
9. Language identification
To identify the language of a given text, use -id option.
As you can see in the above output, I have used Tamil language.
10. Text-to-Speech
This another cool thing that I liked in Translate Shell. Just like the Google translate web service, we can listen to the translation and original text. Put your headphone on and type the language of your choice to listen.
To listen to the translation, run:
To listen to the original text, run:
11. Terminal paging
Sometimes, the contents of translation might be too much for display in one screen. In such cases, use -v option to display the translation result page by page.
12. Getting help
To display help section, run:
To display Translate shell man page:
Note: Here M is capital letter.
And, that’s all for now. You know how to use Google translate from command line on Unix-like systems. As you can see, using Google translate service from command line is easy, kind of fun and interesting.
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