Quickstart: Use the Translator Text API to transliterate text with Node.js

• 02/21/2019
• 3 minutes to read
• Contributors
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In this quickstart, you'll learn how to transliterate (convert) text from one script to another using Node.js and the Translator Text REST API. In the sample provided, Japanese is transliterated to use the Latin alphabet.

This quickstart requires an Azure Cognitive Services account with a Translator Text resource. If you don't have an account, you can use the free trial to get a subscription key.

Prerequisites

This quickstart requires:

• Node 8.12.x or later
• An Azure subscription key for Translator Text

Create a project and import required modules

Create a new project using your favorite IDE or editor, or a new folder with a file named translate-text.js on your desktop. Then copy this code snippet into your project/file:

const request = require('request');
const uuidv4 = require('uuid/v4');

These modules are required to construct the HTTP request, and create a unique identifier for the 'X-ClientTraceId' header.

Set the subscription key

This code will try to read your Translator Text subscription key from the environment variable TRANSLATOR_TEXT_KEY. If you're not familiar with environment variables, you can set subscriptionKey as a string and comment out the conditional statement.

Copy this code into your project:

/* Checks to see if the subscription key is available
as an environment variable. If you are setting your subscription key as a
string, then comment these lines out.

If you want to set your subscription key as a string, replace the value for
the Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header as a string. */
const subscriptionKey = process.env.TRANSLATOR_TEXT_KEY;
if (!subscriptionKey) {
  throw new Error('Environment variable for your subscription key is not set.')
};

Configure the request

The request() method, made available through the request module, allows us to pass the HTTP method, URL, request params, headers, and the JSON body as an options object. In this code snippet, we'll configure the request:

let options = {
    method: 'POST',
    baseUrl: 'https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/',
    url: 'transliterate',
    qs: {
      'api-version': '3.0',
      'language': 'ja',
      'fromScript': 'jpan',
      'toScript': 'latn'
    },
    headers: {
      'Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key': subscriptionKey,
      'Content-type': 'application/json',
      'X-ClientTraceId': uuidv4().toString()
    },
    body: [{
          'text': 'こんにちは'
    }],
    json: true,
};

Authentication

The easiest way to authenticate a request is to pass in your subscription key as an Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key header, which is what we use in this sample. As an alternative, you can exchange your subscription key for an access token, and pass the access token along as an Authorization header to validate your request. For more information, see Authentication.

Make the request and print the response

Next, we'll create the request using the request() method. It takes the options object that we created in the previous section as the first argument, then prints the prettified JSON response.

request(options, function(err, res, body){
    console.log(JSON.stringify(body, null, 4));
});

Put it all together

That's it, you've put together a simple program that will call the Translator Text API and return a JSON response. Now it's time to run your program:

node transliterate-text.js

If you'd like to compare your code against ours, the complete sample is available on GitHub.

Sample response

[
    {
        "script": "latn",
        "text": "konnichiwa"
    }
]

Clean up resources

If you've hardcoded your subscription key into your program, make sure to remove the subscription key when you're finished with this quickstart.

Next steps

See also

In addition to language detection, learn how to use the Translator Text API to:

• Translate text
• Identify the language by input
• Get alternate translations
• Get a list of supported languages
• Determine sentence lengths from an input