Translation Doocuments¶

Objective¶

IBM Watson™ Language Translator allows you to translate text programmatically from one language into another language.

Translate files from one language to another while preserving the original format. More than 12 different file formats can be translated, including MS Office, Open Office, and PDF.

Make sure the document you want to translate meets the following Maximum file size requirements:

20 MB for service instances on Standard, Advanced, and Premium plans
2 MB for service instances on the Lite plan

Tools Used¶

Watson Language Translator

Requirements¶

IBM Cloud Account

Steps¶

To test drive Translator API,

Go to the terminal window that you have configured in the previous section.
The terminal window should have been ready for making API calls. If not, execute command
```
export apikey=<your API key>
export url=<your url>
```
Submit a request to translate sample.pdf from English to Spanish.
```
curl -X POST --user "apikey:$apikey" --form "file=@sample.pdf" --form "source=en" --form "target=es" "$url/v3/documents?version=2018-05-01"
```
The command uses apikey for API access credential. It takes input file, source language and target language as parameters.

It returns the following information including document-id.

{
    "document_id" : "e3b10684-83b0-457b-8c74-0774b41ff9e5",
    "filename" : "sample.pdf",
    "model_id" : "en-es",
    "source" : "en",
    "target" : "es",
    "status" : "processing",
    "created" : "2020-06-22T21:35:12Z"
}

Record the document_id.
```
export DOC_ID=<document_id>
```
To translate a document with a custom model, use the model_id parameter instead. For example, the following request translates the document with the custom model identified by the model ID 96221b69-8e46-42e4-a3c1-808e17c787ca (which is NOT available for the workshop).
```
curl -X POST --user "apikey:$apikey" --form "file=@sample.pdf" --form "model_id=96221b69-8e46-42e4-a3c1-808e17c787ca" "$url/v3/documents?version=2018-05-01"
```
Note, you are going to create custom model in the next section.
Check the translation status

After you have submitted a document for translation, you can check the translation status to find out when the translated document is available to download. Replace the document ID e3b10684-83b0-457b-8c74-0774b41ff9e5 with yours.
```
curl -X GET --user "apikey:$apikey" "$url/v3/documents/$DOC_ID?version=2018-05-01"
```

The document tramslation of sample.pdf should take no time before it becomoes available.

{
    "document_id" : "e3b10684-83b0-457b-8c74-0774b41ff9e5",
    "filename" : "sample.pdf",
    "model_id" : "en-es",
    "source" : "en",
    "target" : "es",
    "status" : "available",
    "created" : "2020-06-22T21:35:12Z",
    "completed" : "2020-06-22T21:35:15Z",
    "word_count" : 10,
    "character_count" : 49
}

Download the translated document. The following example request saves the translated document with document ID $DOC_ID to the file sample-es.pdf.
```
curl -X GET --user "apikey:$apikey" --output "sample-es.pdf" "$url/v3/documents/$DOC_ID/translated_document?version=2018-05-01"
```
Review the translated document sample-es.pdf. It is downloaded to the current working folder.
Delete documents. To delete the original submission of sample.pdf and its Spanish translation, execute the command below. Replace the e3b10684-83b0-457b-8c74-0774b41ff9e5 with your document ID.
```
curl -X DELETE --user "apikey:$apikey" "$url/v3/documents/$DOC_ID?version=2018-05-01"
```
Note: Original documents and any associated translated documents are deleted automatically after they have not been used for a certain period of time.

There is lots of great information, tutorials, articles, etc on the IBM Developer site as well as broader web. Here are a subset of good examples related to data understanding, visualization and processing:

General Links¶

IBM Developer