One of the several services and APIs that developers can use from Google is the Cloud Translation API, which offers the ability to perform machine learning (ML) based translations of any string into any supported language. The list of supported languages is long and it’s getting longer over time. Google provides pre-trained models for translation, but custom models can be trained as well. And as we will find out soon in this tutorial, translation is fast, accurate, and of high-quality.
In this post we are going to learn how to use the Translation API so we can support and provide realtime translation in our apps. To make it clear, we won’t train any model, it’s totally out of our scope. What we’ll discuss about will focus on three different kind of services that Google provides with Translation API:
- Text translation: Translating some text from a source language to a target language.
- Language detection: Useful feature when source language is unknown or it must be detected automatically.
- Supported languages: A list of all languages supported for translation.