gtranslate

gtranslate

Better front-end for Google Translate that is lightweight, doesn't track you and works without JavaScript.

Using the API

As well as a web UI, gtranslate provides a simple REST API to fetch translations, it can be accessed on /api endpoint with the GET method. It accepts the following query parameters:

• from - code of the language to translate from (use auto to auto-detect)
• to - code of the language to translate to
• text - text to translate

Language codes are standard ISO-639 codes. Full list of them is available in languages.go in the source.

Example using curl:

$ curl 'https://your.gtranslate.instance/api?from=en&to=fr&text=Hello'
Bonjour

Installation

$ git clone https://git.sr.ht/~yerinalexey/gtranslate
$ cd gtranslate

$ make

And optionally:
# make install

Running the server

$ ./gtranslate-server

Note: if you're running it outside of development environment, you should pass --templates-dir and --static-dir arguments pointing to templates and static directories:

$ ./gtranslate-server \
  --templates-dir path/to/gtranslate/templates \
  --static-dir    path/to/gtranslate/static

Other settings (available with ./gtranslate-server --help):

Usage of ./gtranslate-server:
  -b, --bind string            Address to bind the server to, [addr]:port (default ":5000")
      --proxy string           Proxy URL, with no scheme http is assumed
      --static-dir string      Static files directory (default "./static")
      --templates-dir string   Templates directory (default "./templates")
      --user-agent string      User-Agent header to use

Using a local query tool

A gtranslate-query tool is also provided. It mirrors server's API into a command-line application.

$ gtranslate-query en fr "Hello"
Bonjour

Usage: ./gtranslate-query [flags] <from> <to> <text>
Flags:
      --proxy string        Proxy URL, with no scheme http is assumed
      --user-agent string   User-Agent header to use

Using Tor

Routing requests through Tor has its benefits:

• Google will have a hard time tracking gtranslate servers as they act like normal Tor users
• You probably won't get banned as requests are made from different IPs

Despite that, it has some drawbacks:

• Much slower response time
• Might get capcha or some other junk that will block requests
• If doing the wrong thing, you might get your server compromised (in terms of anonymity)
• This feature is not tested in development

First of, you need to set up Tor daemon on the server. Here's a guide on ArchWiki: Tor.

With default settings, it should start a SOCKS5 proxy on localhost, port 9050.

Also, to minimize fingerprint, you need to use a very common user agent on Tor network. And, you guessed it, get it straight from Tor Browser. If you have one, you can just open https://httpbin.org/headers and copy it from there. If not, the latest available is provided here: Tor Browser's User-Agent.

Full setup:

./gtranslate-server \
  --user-agent "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; rv:68.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/68.0" \
  --proxy "socks5://localhost:9050" \
  ...

If you have managed to set it up or experienced issues with this guide, feel free to shoot an email to my public inbox.