Found a Google Translate endpoint that doesn't require an API key.

[SuperSonicHub1]

This isn't a bug report, just a sharing of some findings while looking through minified source code.

While digging through the source code of Google's Google Dictionary Chrome extension, which has support for translating via Google Translate, I found the endpoint they use in order to do just that. Since googletrans frequently runs into 5xx errors, it might be useful to switch off to another endpoint, although this one is also annoyingly touchy with 403s.

Breakdown

Endpoint: https://clients5.google.com/translate_a/t

Query Parameters

Query Parameter	Default	Notes
client	dict-chrome-ex	Needs to be dict-chrome-ex or else you'll get a 403 error.
sl	auto	Designates the source language of the text to translate.
tl	(none)	Designates the destination language of the text to translate.
q	(none)	Text to translate

Example Response

URL: https://clients5.google.com/translate_a/t?client=dict-chrome-ex&sl=auto&tl=en&q=bonjour

{
  "sentences": [
    {
      "trans": "Hello",
      "orig": "bonjour",
      "backend": 1
    }
  ],
  "dict": [
    {
      "pos": "interjection",
      "terms": [
        "Hello!",
        "Hi!",
        "Good morning!",
        "Good afternoon!",
        "How do you do?",
        "Hallo!",
        "Hullo!",
        "Welcome!"
      ],
      "entry": [
        {
          "word": "Hello!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Bonjour!",
            "Salut!",
            "Tiens!",
            "Allô!"
          ],
          "score": 0.7316156
        },
        {
          "word": "Hi!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Salut!",
            "Bonjour!",
            "Hé!"
          ],
          "score": 0.084690653
        },
        {
          "word": "Good morning!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Bonjour!"
          ],
          "score": 0.065957151
        },
        {
          "word": "Good afternoon!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Bonjour!"
          ],
          "score": 0.02749503
        },
        {
          "word": "How do you do?",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Bonjour!",
            "Salut!",
            "Ça marche?"
          ]
        },
        {
          "word": "Hallo!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Bonjour!",
            "Tiens!",
            "Salut!",
            "Allô!"
          ]
        },
        {
          "word": "Hullo!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Tiens!",
            "Allô!",
            "Salut!",
            "Bonjour!"
          ]
        },
        {
          "word": "Welcome!",
          "reverse_translation": [
            "Salut!",
            "Bonjour!",
            "Soyez le bienvenu!"
          ]
        }
      ],
      "base_form": "Bonjour!",
      "pos_enum": 9
    }
  ],
  "src": "fr",
  "alternative_translations": [
    {
      "src_phrase": "bonjour",
      "alternative": [
        {
          "word_postproc": "Hello",
          "score": 1000,
          "has_preceding_space": true,
          "attach_to_next_token": false
        }
      ],
      "srcunicodeoffsets": [
        {
          "begin": 0,
          "end": 7
        }
      ],
      "raw_src_segment": "bonjour",
      "start_pos": 0,
      "end_pos": 0
    }
  ],
  "confidence": 0.96875,
  "ld_result": {
    "srclangs": [
      "fr"
    ],
    "srclangs_confidences": [
      0.96875
    ],
    "extended_srclangs": [
      "fr"
    ]
  },
  "query_inflections": [
    {
      "written_form": "bonjour",
      "features": {
        "gender": 1,
        "number": 2
      }
    },
    {
      "written_form": "bonjours",
      "features": {
        "gender": 1,
        "number": 1
      }
    },
    {
      "written_form": "bonjour",
      "features": {
        "number": 2
      }
    },
    {
      "written_form": "bonjours",
      "features": {
        "number": 1
      }
    }
  ]
}

[ssut]

This seems like a great discovery! I'll take a look at this shortly. Thank you so much!

[SuperSonicHub1]

@ssut No problem!

[SuperSonicHub1]

@theonefoster Glad to be of use!

[shatteringlass]

Stopped working for me (403)

[SuperSonicHub1]

@shatteringlass Mentioned that in the initial post:

it might be useful to switch off to another endpoint, although this one is also annoyingly touchy with 403s.

That's why I want this endpoint to be seamlessly integrated into googletrans, with it switching between endpoints if one is facing 4xx/5xx errors.

[Animenosekai]

I found another endpoint within the source code of one of the google translate extensions on VSCode too.

"https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single?client=gtx&dt=t + params"
// where the params are:
{
  "sl": source language,
  "tl": destination language,
  "q": the text to translate
}

The results looks something like this:

[[["こんにちは、今日はお元気ですか？","Hello, how are you today?",null,null,3,null,null,[[]
]
,[[["9588ca5d94759e1e85ee26c1b641b1e3","kgmt_en_ja_2020q3.md"]
]
]
]
]
,null,"en",null,null,null,null,[]
]

for the query: https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single?client=gtx&dt=t&sl=en&tl=ja&q=Hello, how are you today?

And something like this:

[[["Bonjour","Hello",null,null,1]
]
,null,"en",null,null,null,null,[]
]

for the query: https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single?client=gtx&dt=t&sl=en&tl=fr&q=Hello

When using it only to translate things, I would use it like so:

from json import loads
from requests import get
request_result = get("https://translate.googleapis.com/translate_a/single?client=gtx&dt=t&sl=en&tl=fr&q=Hello")
translated_text = loads(request_result.text)[0][0][0]
print(translated_text)

[SuperSonicHub1]

@Animenosekai Awesome, another endpoint to add. We should probably create a way to house all of these endpoints through one API, perhaps an interface that all of the endpoints implement?

[NawtJ0sh]

What am I doing wrong?

word = 'لماذا تفعل هذا'
try:
    request_result = requests.post("https://clients5.google.com/translate_a/t?client=dict-chrome-ex&sl=auto&tl=en&q="+ word).json()
    
    print(request_result)
    print('[In English]: '+ request_result['alternative_translations'][0]['alternative'][0]['word_postproc'])
    print('[Language Dectected]: ' + request_result['src'])
except:
     traceback.print_exc()

Output:

[In English]: Ù „Ù… Ø§Ø ° ا ت٠عل Ù ‡ Ø ° ا
[Language Dectected]: co

why is it outputting it like that?

[SuperSonicHub1]

@NawtJ0sh Why are you making a POST request? It's a GET request you should be making. How does that even return a response?

[NawtJ0sh]

No idea, it does the exact same thing with requests.get()

[Animenosekai]

No idea, it does the exact same thing with requests.get()

If you try to open it in a browser it seems to work fine:
https://clients5.google.com/translate_a/t?client=dict-chrome-ex&sl=auto&tl=en&q=%D9%84%D9%85%D8%A7%D8%B0%D8%A7%20%D8%AA%D9%81%D8%B9%D9%84%20%D9%87%D8%B0%D8%A7

{"sentences":[{"trans":"Why are you doing this","orig":"لماذا تفعل هذا","backend":1},{"src_translit":"limadha tafeal hdha"}],"src":"ar","alternative_translations":[{"src_phrase":"لماذا تفعل هذا","alternative":[{"word_postproc":"Why are you doing this","score":1000,"has_preceding_space":true,"attach_to_next_token":false}],"srcunicodeoffsets":[{"begin":0,"end":14}],"raw_src_segment":"لماذا تفعل هذا","start_pos":0,"end_pos":0}],"confidence":1,"ld_result":{"srclangs":["ar"],"srclangs_confidences":[1],"extended_srclangs":["ar"]}}

Might be a problem with the decoding, try to use the json module yourself (print request.text() first and print the json formatted version json.loads(request.text()) to see the differences)

It might be because your terminal doesn't support arabic or something like that

Also maybe try to url encode the text before sending it (and use GET as it should not work with POST)

[d4n3436]

After some testing with the request headers, I found the solution for the garbled text.
Simply set the User-Agent header to the one that Google Chrome uses.

Example:

import requests
word = 'لماذا تفعل هذا'
url = "https://clients5.google.com/translate_a/t?client=dict-chrome-ex&sl=auto&tl=en&q=" + word
headers = {
    'User-Agent': 'Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 10.0; Win64; x64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Chrome/88.0.4324.104 Safari/537.36'
}

try:
    request_result = requests.get(url, headers=headers).json()
    
    print(request_result)
    print('[In English]: ' + request_result['alternative_translations'][0]['alternative'][0]['word_postproc'])
    print('[Language Dectected]: ' + request_result['src'])
except:
     pass

Response:

{'sentences': [{'trans': 'Why are you doing this', 'orig': 'لماذا تفعل هذا', 'backend': 1}, {'src_translit': 'limadha tafeal hdha'}], 'src': 'ar', 'alternative_translations': [{'src_phrase': 'لماذا تفعل هذا', 'alternative': [{'word_postproc': 'Why are you doing this', 'score': 1000, 'has_preceding_space': True, 'attach_to_next_token': False}], 'srcunicodeoffsets': [{'begin': 0, 'end': 14}], 'raw_src_segment': 'لماذا تفعل هذا', 'start_pos': 0, 'end_pos': 0}], 'confidence': 1, 'ld_result': {'srclangs': ['ar'], 'srclangs_confidences': [1], 'extended_srclangs': ['ar']}}
[In English]: Why are you doing this
[Language Dectected]: ar

[SuperSonicHub1]

@d4n3436 How interesting. It's almost like a form of copy protection.

[Animenosekai]

@d4n3436 How interesting. It's almost like a form of copy protection.

Maybe that they are retrieving the User-Agent to process some analytics in the bg and that without it it breaks something.

But, I mean, still weird that it gives a gibberish response and that it accepted the POST request