Is there a translation API service for Chinese to English?

Question

I have a list of product names in Chinese. I want to translate these into English, I have tried Google AJAX language API, but it seems that translation is not good, it would be great if someone could give me some advice about or point me towards a better choice.
Thank you.

Answer 1

I think Google are probably one of the best web based automatic translation services.

Answer 2

Eh, Google is certainly a great translation service, but if you're looking for reliable translations you probably need to go human - machine translation can be sketchy at best. myGengo has an API to facilitate machine translation; your question is tagged with "python", so I've thrown some sample code below, but you can get a more extensive walkthrough if you so desire.

The cool thing is that you can get a machine translation while you wait for your human translation to be done, so if you need something in the time between you're not high and dry. ;)

First, install the mygengo API library for Python:

pip install mygengo

Then, request translations like below:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
from mygengo import MyGengo

gengo = MyGengo(
    public_key = 'your_mygengo_api_key',
    private_key = 'your_mygengo_private_key',
    sandbox = False, # possibly False, depending on your dev needs
)

translation = gengo.postTranslationJob(job = {
    'type': 'text', # REQUIRED. Type to translate, you'll probably always put 'text' here (for now ;)
    'slug': 'Translating Chinese to English with the myGengo API', # REQUIRED. For storing on the myGengo side
    'body_src': '我們今天要去那裏嗎', # REQUIRED. The text you're translating. ;P
    'lc_src': 'zh', # REQUIRED. source_language_code (see getServiceLanguages() for a list of codes)  
    'lc_tgt': 'en', # REQUIRED. target_language_code (see getServiceLanguages() for a list of codes)
    'tier': 'standard', # REQUIRED. tier type ("machine", "standard", "pro", or "ultra")
})

# This will print out a machine translation; for your human translation, you can
# poll and check often, or set up a URL for it to post the results to.
print translation['response']['job']['body_tgt']