*** This post is no longer up-to-date. Take a look at my new post, revisiting how to tranlate text in C# using Google Translate ***

Sometimes, it would be great to be able to translate a text from e.g. English to Danish directly from C#. This could be useful when you want to translate a Resource file into another language.

Google Translate is awesome. There’s also Windows Live Translator, but Microsoft are far behind Google (also) in this game.

Code:

using System;
using System.Net;
using System.Text;
using System.Text.RegularExpressions;

namespace Utilities
{
  public static class Translator
  {
    /// <summary>
    /// Translates the text.
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="input">The input.</param>
    /// <param name="languagePair">The language pair.</param>
    /// <returns></returns>
    public static string TranslateText(string input, string languagePair)
    {
      return TranslateText(input, languagePair, System.Text.Encoding.UTF7);
    }

    /// <summary>
    /// Translate Text using Google Translate
    /// </summary>
    /// <param name="input">The string you want translated</param>
    /// <param name="languagePair">2 letter Language Pair, delimited by "|". 
    /// e.g. "en|da" language pair means to translate from English to Danish</param>
    /// <param name="encoding">The encoding.</param>
    /// <returns>Translated to String</returns>
    public static string TranslateText(string input, string languagePair, Encoding encoding)
    {
      string url = String.Format("http://www.google.com/translate_t?hl=en&ie=UTF8&text={0}&langpair={1}", input, languagePair);

      string result = String.Empty;

      using (WebClient webClient = new WebClient())
      {
        webClient.Encoding = encoding;
        result = webClient.DownloadString(url);
      }

      Match m = Regex.Match(result, "(?<=<div id=result_box dir=\"ltr\">)(.*?)(?=</div>)");

      if (m.Success)
        result = m.Value;

      return result;
    }
  }
}

The translated string is fetched by the RegEx close to the bottom. This could of course change, and you have to keep it up to date.

Professional translations - even via API!