Dev interest in using Translator and Language Detector APIs

[ayuishii]

Hi web developers!

We would like to gauge interest and learn about potential use cases for the Translator and Language Detector APIs, as described in the explainer.

If you are interested in potentially using this new API, please reply to this thread with your use case and affiliation to a company, organization or app, if any.

Thanks!

[whalderman]

We use chrome.i18n.detectLanguage for an extension developed by Bruce Clay Japan. Having a similar capability in all execution contexts sounds nice.

Since the translation of user-generated-content is already handled by the browsers and translation of site content is ideally done ahead of time, it's difficult to imagine use cases outside of communication apps (which I admittedly have no experience in developing), where each user has a preferred input and output language. The listed use cases sound great (especially translating spoken content), but passing this capability to web developers sounds like it'll be a lot easier for developers to unwittingly overwrite or otherwise lose the original content produced by the user.

[sandstrom]

Useful in multi-lingual sites where people of different languages collaborate. For example, in an internal chat feature users could translate text written in a language they don't understand, into a language they understand.

Many collaborative apps (office apps) would have this use-case.

It would likely also be good in social media type sites, e.g. Instagram has a 'Translate comment' and 'translate post' feature next to content written in [to the user] foreign languages.

[collimarco]

I am really interested. I already made a proposal on WICG Discourse forum some years ago.

Another simple alternative, would be to give websites a way to programmatically trigger the browser built-in translation prompt.

document.querySelector("#custom-translate-button").addEventListener("click", () => {
  window.showTranslationPrompt();
});

Then the user would see the browser popup that asks what language they want to translate to.

Use case: We want to provide a simple user experience for translating restaurants menus to any language on BuonMenu when a user sitting at the restaurant is reading a menu. Basically the restaurant owner should write the menu in their main language, and then any user can translate the menu to their favorite language by using the browser feature. The browser built-in translation is not very intuitive for users, sometimes they don't see it and they don't know that their browser can translate the page.

[oyejorge]

I was playing around with language learning games yesterday. The API as it exists in Chrome works great.