xliffmerge autotranslate feature

Starting with version 0.7.0 you can use xliffmerge to fully automatically translate all messages. For translation the Google Cloud Translation API is used.

Create an API KEY

Google Translate is not a free service. To use it, you need an account (first year for free) and you have to create an API Key.

Information about free usage of Google Cloud Platform can be found here: Google Cloud Platform FAQ.

The details to create an API KEY are described here: Create an API key for your Google Cloud Platform Console project.

Configure xliffmerge

The auto translate feature must be enabled explicitly by setting the value autotranslate to true in the config file xliffmerge.json.

To be allowed to use the Google Cloud Translate API service, you also need a valid API KEY. There are 3 possibilities to configure:

• Set apikey in the configuration file (should be avoided because of the risk to reveal it).
• Set apikeyfilein the configuration file pointing to a file that contains your api key.
• Set ENV VAR API_KEY_FILE pointing to a file that contains your api key.

You should put your key into a file like googleTranslateApiKey.txt. Then add this file to .gitignore to avoid publishing it by mistake. Then set apikeyfile to point to this file.

{
  "xliffmergeOptions": {
...
    "autotranslate": true,
    "apikeyfile: "/users/me/.secrets/googleTranslateApiKey.txt",
...
  }
}

Alternatively you can use the ENV VAR API_KEY_FILE and do not configure it in the config file:

export API_KEY_FILE=/users/me/.secrets/googleTranslateApiKey.txt

If you don't want to autotranslate all your languages you can alternatively set autotranslate to the list of languages you want to translate:

{
  "xliffmergeOptions": {
...
    "autotranslate": ["fr", "ru"],
...
  }
}

Run it

There is nothing else to do.

From now on whenever you run xliffmerge it will detect all untranslated units in the language files and will translate them.

Of course, automatic translation is far away from perfection. So every translated unit will get status translated to show that there might be something to do. Your translation tool (e.g. TinyTranslator) should have a chance to filter for that. You can correct some non perfect translations manually then.