When working with Linux, you may often come across text in foreign languages, such as instructional pages or output from various tools, created by someone who works in a language other than your native language. In these cases, you usually resort to looking up individual terms and phrases on translation sites  – together with time-consuming paging back and forth between the console and web browser. In such cases as these, Google Translate CLI comes to the rescue: With just one call, it conveniently translates single words or whole blocks of text directly at the command line.

Installation

The best-known tool for straightforward translation of terms and texts is Google Translate: You type the source text in the left-hand box, and the box on the right shows you the real-time translation in the target language [1]. Although the browser version of the translation project is available for free, Google also offers a commercial API that you can embed in your own applications. Besides the financial aspect, however, the API has another disadvantage: Each user requires a separate API key, which makes this version almost totally uninteresting for free translation tools.

Google Translate CLI [2] therefore deliberately takes the roundabout route of accessing the Google Translate website directly by means of a script. Thus, you do not need to have your own API key, yet you still receive a response in a brief and precise form  – much as you would through an API.

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