Sometimes is can be quite useful to be able to translate content from one language to another from within a program. There are many compelling reasons why you might like the idea of auto translating text. The reason why I’m interested in writing this script is that it is useful to sometimes create unique content online for SEO reasons. Search engines like to see unique content rather than words that have been copied and pasted from other websites. What you’re looking for in web content is:

1. A lot of it.
2. Highly related to the keywords you’re targeting.

When trying to get a great position in the organic search results it is important to recognize that you’re competing against an army of low cost outsourced people that are pumping out page after page of mediocre content and then running scripts to generate thousands of back-links to the sites they are trying to rank.  It is very much impossible to get the top spot for any desirable keyword if you’re writing all the content yourself.  You need some help with this.

That’s where Google Translate comes in.

Take an article from somewhere, push it through a round trip of translation such as English->French->English and the content will then be unique enough that it won’t raise any flags that it has been copied from somewhere else on the internet.  The content may not be readable but it will make for fodder for the search engines to eat up.

Using this technique it is possible to build massive websites of unique content overnight and have it quickly rank highly.

Unfortunately Google doesn’t provide an API for translating text.  That means the script has to resort to scraping which is inherently prone to breaking.  The script uses BeautifulSoup to help with the parsing of the HTML content. (Note: I had to use the older 3.0.x series of BeautifulSoup to successfully parse the content)

The code for this was based on this script by technobabble.

import sys
import urllib2
import urllib
 
from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulSoup # available at: http://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/
 
def translate(sl, tl, text):
    """ Translates a given text from source language (sl) to
        target language (tl) """
 
    opener = urllib2.build_opener()
    opener.addheaders = [('User-agent', 'Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 6.0; Windows NT 5.0)')]
 
    translated_page = opener.open(
        "http://translate.google.com/translate_t?" + 
        urllib.urlencode({'sl': sl, 'tl': tl}),
        data=urllib.urlencode({'hl': 'en',
                               'ie': 'UTF8',
                               'text': text.encode('utf-8'),
                               'sl': sl, 'tl': tl})
    )
 
    translated_soup = BeautifulSoup(translated_page)
 
    return translated_soup('div', id='result_box')[0].string
 
if __name__=='__main__':
    print translate('en', 'fr', u'hello')

To generate unique content you can use this within your own python program like this:

import translate
 
content = get_content()
new_content = translate('fr', 'en', translate('en','fr', content))
publish_content(new_content)

Technorati Tags: beautifulsoup, content generation, google, programming, Python, scripting, seo, translate, web scraping

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