Translate Shell (formerly Google Translate CLI) is a command-line translator powered by Google Translate (default), Bing Translator, Yandex.Translate, and Apertium. It gives you easy access to one of these translation engines in your terminal:
$ trans 'Saluton, Mondo!'
Saluton, Mondo!
Hello, World!
Translations of Saluton, Mondo!
[ Esperanto -> English ]
Saluton ,
Hello,
Mondo !
World!
By default, translations with detailed explanations are shown. You can also translate the text briefly: (only the most relevant translation will be shown)
$ trans -brief 'Saluton, Mondo!'
Hello, World!
Translate Shell can also be used like an interactive shell; input the text to be translated line by line:
$ trans -shell -brief
> Rien ne réussit comme le succès.
Nothing succeeds like success.
> Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich stärker.
What does not kill me makes me stronger.
> Юмор есть остроумие глубокого чувства.
Humor has a deep sense of wit.
> 學而不思則罔，思而不學則殆。
Learning without thought is labor lost, thought without learning is perilous.
> 幸福になるためには、人から愛されるのが一番の近道。
In order to be happy, the best way is to be loved by people.
Translate Shell is known to work on many POSIX-compliant systems, including but not limited to:
- GNU/Linux
- macOS
- *BSD
- Android (through Termux)
- Windows (through WSL, Cygwin, or MSYS2)
- GNU Awk (gawk) 4.0 or later
- This program relies heavily on GNU extensions of the AWK language, which are non-portable for other AWK implementations (e.g. nawk).
- How to get gawk:
- gawk comes with all GNU/Linux distributions.
- On FreeBSD, gawk is available in the ports.
- On macOS, gawk is available in MacPorts and Homebrew.
- Please note that gawk 5.2.0 has a known bug -- update to gawk 5.2.1 instead.
- GNU Bash or Zsh
- You may use Translate Shell from any Unix shell of your choice (bash, zsh, ksh, tcsh, fish, etc.); however, the wrapper script requires either bash or zsh installed.
These dependencies are optional, but strongly recommended for full functionality:
- curl with OpenSSL support
- GNU FriBidi: an implementation of the Unicode Bidirectional Algorithm (bidi)
- required for displaying text in Right-to-Left scripts (e.g. Arabic, Hebrew)
- mplayer, mpv, mpg123, or eSpeak
- required for the Text-to-Speech functionality
- less, more or most
- required for terminal paging
- rlwrap: a GNU readline wrapper
- required for readline-style editing and history in the interactive shell
- aspell or hunspell
- required for spell checking
It is a must to have corresponding fonts for the language(s) / script(s) you wish to display in your terminal. See wiki: Writing Systems and Fonts for more details on scripts and recommended Unicode fonts.
Start an interactive shell and translate anything you input into your native language: (in bash or zsh)
$ gawk -f <(curl -Ls --compressed https://git.io/translate) -- -shell
(in fish)
$ gawk -f (curl -Ls --compressed https://git.io/translate | psub) -- -shell
To try out via Docker, run:
$ docker pull soimort/translate-shell
Then you may start an interactive shell from the Docker image for translating:
$ docker run -it soimort/translate-shell -shell
Download the self-contained executable and place it into your path. It's everything you need.
$ wget git.io/trans
$ chmod +x ./trans
There is a GPG signature.
See wiki: Distros on how to install from a specific package manager on your distro.
Using Antigen (for Zsh users)
Add the following line to your .zshrc:
antigen bundle soimort/translate-shell@develop
$ git clone https://github.com/soimort/translate-shell
$ cd translate-shell/
$ make
$ [sudo] make install
In case you have only zsh but not bash in your system, build with:
$ make TARGET=zsh
The default PREFIX of installation is /usr/local. To install the program to somewhere else (e.g. /usr, ~/.local), use:
$ [sudo] make PREFIX=/usr install
Google Translate can identify the language of the source text automatically, and Translate Shell by default translates the source text into the language of your locale.
$ trans vorto
Translate a word into French:
$ trans :fr word
Translate a word into Chinese and Japanese: (use a plus sign "+" as the delimiter)
$ trans :zh+ja word
Alternatively, equals sign ("=") can be used in place of the colon (":"). Note that in some shells (e.g. zsh), equals signs may be interpreted differently, therefore the argument specifying languages needs to be protected:
$ trans {=zh+ja} word
$ trans '=zh+ja' word
You can also use the -target (-t) option to specify the target language(s):
$ trans -t zh+ja word
With the -t option, the name of the language may also be used instead of the language code:
$ trans -t japanese word
$ trans -t 日本語 word
Google Translate may wrongly identify the source text as some other language than you expected:
$ trans 手紙
In that case, you need to specify its language explicitly:
$ trans ja: 手紙
$ trans zh: 手紙
You can also use the -source (-s) option to specify the source language:
$ trans -s ja 手紙
Translate each word alone:
$ trans en:zh word processor
Put words into one argument, and translate them as a whole:
$ trans en:zh "word processor"
Translating a sentence is much the same like translating a phrase; you can just quote the sentence into one argument:
$ trans :zh "To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,"
$ trans :zh 'To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,'
It is also possible to translate multi-line sentences:
$ trans :zh "Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,
> To the last syllable of recorded time;
> And all our yesterdays have lighted fools
> The way to dusty death."
To avoid punctuation marks (e.g. "!") or other special characters being interpreted by the shell, use single quotes:
$ trans :zh 'Out, out, brief candle!'
There are some cases though, you may still want to use double quotes: (e.g. the sentence contains a single quotation mark "'")
$ trans :zh "Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player"
Alternatively, use the -join-sentence (-j) option to treat all arguments as one sentence so that quotes can be omitted:
$ trans -j :zh Life\'s but a walking shadow, a poor player
By default, Translate Shell displays translations in a verbose manner. If you prefer to see only the most relevant translation, there is a brief mode available using the -brief (-b) option:
$ trans -b :fr "Saluton, Mondo"
In brief mode, phonetic notation (if any) is not shown by default. To enable this, put an at sign "@" in front of the language code:
$ trans -b :@ja "Saluton, Mondo"
Google Translate can be used as a dictionary. When translating a word and the target language is the same as the source language, the dictionary entry of the word is shown:
$ trans :en word
To enable dictionary mode no matter whether the source language and the target language are identical, use the -dictionary (-d) option.
$ trans -d fr: mot
Note: Not every language supported by Google Translate has provided dictionary data. See wiki: Languages to find out which language(s) has dictionary support.
Use the -identify (-id) option to identify the language of the text:
$ trans -id 言葉
Use the -play (-p) option to listen to the translation:
$ trans -b -p :ja "Saluton, Mondo"
Use the -speak (-sp) option to listen to the original text:
$ trans -sp "你好，世界"
Sometimes the content of translation can be too much for display in one screen. Use the -view (-v) option to view the translation in a terminal pager such as less or more:
$ trans -d -v word
Right-to-Left (RTL) languages are well supported via GNU FriBidi.
The program will automatically adjust the screen width for padding when displaying right-to-left languages. Alternatively, you may use the -width (-w) option to specify the screen width:
$ trans -b -w 40 :he "Saluton, Mondo"
See wiki: Languages to find out which language(s) uses a Right-to-Left writing system.
If no source text is given in command-line arguments, the program will read from standard input, or from the file specified by the -input (-i) option:
$ echo "Saluton, Mondo" | trans -b :fr
$ trans -b -i input.txt :fr
Translations are written to standard output, or to the file specified by the -output (-o) option:
$ echo "Saluton, Mondo" | trans -b -o output.txt :fr
Instead of using the -input option, a file URI scheme (file:// followed by the file name) can be used as a command-line argument:
$ trans :fr file://input.txt
Note: Brief mode is used when translating from file URI schemes.
To translate a web page, an http(s) URI scheme can be used as an argument:
$ trans :fr http://www.w3.org/
A browser session will open for viewing the translation (via Google Translate's web interface). To specify your web browser of choice, use the -browser option:
$ trans -browser firefox :fr http://www.w3.org/
Use the -linguist (-L) option to view details of one or more languages:
$ trans -L fr
$ trans -L de+en
Some basic information of the language will be displayed: its English name and endonym (language name in the language itself), language family, writing system, canonical Google Translate code and ISO 639-3 code.
Start an interactive shell using the -shell (or -interactive, -I) option:
$ trans -shell
You may specify the source language and the target language(s) before starting an interactive shell:
$ trans -shell en:fr
You may also change these settings during an interactive session. See wiki: REPL for more advanced usage of the interactive Translate Shell.
For more details on command-line options, see the man page trans(1) or use trans -M in a terminal.
$usage$
Use trans -R or trans -T to view the reference table in a terminal.
For more details on languages and corresponding codes, see wiki: Languages.
Please review the guidelines for contributing before reporting an issue or sending a pull request.
This is free and unencumbered software released into the public domain. See LICENSE and WAIVER for details.