Text Translation with Azure Translation Services

In the last post, we built an OCR to get text from images. In this post we will translate text from any language to Hindi.

First, create an instance of Text Translator service in your resource group. We used “Translator” Resource Group for this experiment.

Grab the Service key to be used in our application.

In the app

BingTranslator.TranslateTextAsync(text, LanguageCodes.Hindi);

Pass the text and language code to Bing Translation API and you should get your translated text back.

internal static class BingTranslator
    {
        static readonly string uri = "https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/translate?api-version=3.0&to=";
        public static async Task<string> TranslateTextAsync(string text, string lang)
        {
            System.Object[] body = new System.Object[] { new { Text = text } };
            var requestBody = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(body);

            using (var client = new HttpClient())
            using (var request = new HttpRequestMessage())
            {
                request.Method = HttpMethod.Post;
                request.RequestUri = new Uri(uri + lang);
                request.Content = new StringContent(requestBody, Encoding.UTF8, "application/json");
                request.Headers.Add("Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key", (string)Application.Current.Resources["BingTranslationKey"]);

                var response = await client.SendAsync(request);
                var responseBody = await response.Content.ReadAsStringAsync();
                TranslatedText[] translatedText = TranslatedText.FromJson(responseBody);

                StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
                foreach (TranslatedText textBlock in translatedText)
                {
                    foreach (Translation translation in textBlock.Translations)
                        sb.Append(translation.Text);
                    sb.Append("n");
                }
                return sb.ToString();
            }
        }
    }

Here’s Json response expected from the API

    public partial class TranslatedText
    {
        [JsonProperty("detectedLanguage")]
        public DetectedLanguage DetectedLanguage { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("translations")]
        public Translation[] Translations { get; set; }
    }

    public partial class DetectedLanguage
    {
        [JsonProperty("language")]
        public string Language { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("score")]
        public long Score { get; set; }
    }

    public partial class Translation
    {
        [JsonProperty("text")]
        public string Text { get; set; }

        [JsonProperty("to")]
        public string To { get; set; }
    }

Easy and straight forward, right?