Access lingva translations from emacs. Lingva is a tracking-free alternative front-end for Google translate.
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lingva.el

This is a basic Emacs interface to the lingva API, which allows you to obtain translations of texts from Google Translate without any tracking.

The entry point is lingva-translate, which will translate between lingva-source and lingva-target by default. The text to be translated is, in order, the region if active (also works in pdf-view-mode), or else the word at point, or else what the user inputs.

Called with a single prefix argument, it will prompt the user for a source language. Called with two prefix arguments, it prompts for both a source and a target language. The default source language is to auto-detect, the default target language is English. You can customize the values of both lingva-source and lingva-target.

The translated text appears in a temporary buffer and is also copied to the kill ring/clipboard.

To choose which lingva instance to interact with, customize lingva-instance. The official lingva instance, https://lingva.ml, is the default, but sometimes it goes down, in which case you can switch to another one (a list is available here: lingva-translate instances).

For now the list of supported languages is what is returned by the the API of lingva-instance. It can be obtained/updated by running lingva-update-lingva-languages.

install

lingva.el is available on MELPA. If you already have it set up you can call M-x package-install RET lingva.

linvga buffer commands:

  • i / s - prompt for a new lingva search
  • v - immediately search using the most recent entry in the kill ring/clipboard.

similar projects

You may also be interested in libretrans.el.

There is a fully-featured Google Translate package for emacs: https://github.com/atykhonov/google-translate. There is also a translation framework that supports Google, Bing, and deepL: https://github.com/lorniu/go-translate. They might be useful if you need to access more aspects of the API, as the lingva version is bare-bones and only returns the translated text.