Setup

Rundown of necessary setup steps:

• Create Google Cloud account
• Enable Googe Cloud Translate API
• Set up gcloud command line tool
• Test gcloud command line tool

Create Google Cloud Account

Creating a Google Cloud account requires a credit card.

Obtaining a credit card is generally straightforward, and simply involves burrowing your way into the corporate bureaucracy by getting a job in an IT department.

Academic institutions provide an optimal environment for obtaining a credit card to carry out sanctioned bot flock activities.

Enable API

Enable the Google Cloud Translate API here.

Set Up Command Line Tool

The Google Cloud SDK provides a command line tool that has utilities for interacting with the APIs.

The prior step will give you a JSON key file. Associate this with the command line tool using the auth activate-service-account verb:

gcloud auth activate-service-account --key-file=[PATH]

Set this permanently by setting the location of the key file using an environment variable:

export GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS=${PWD}/krash.json

Test Command Line Tool

The API endpoint we will use is:

https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2

To call this endpoint, we have to include a payload containing our API key, which we obtained earlier when we enabled the API. The gcloud tool provides a way to insert credentials easily:

The command

curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
    -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth print-access-token) \
    --data "{
        'q':'Rainbow mind machine is extendable to keep bots from becoming boring. There are only two components to extend. These two components have a simple and clear order of function calls. Rainbow mind machine uses sensible defaults.',
        'source': 'en',
        'target': 'ru',
        'format': 'text'
    }" "https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2"

should yield the result:

{
  "data": {
    "translations": [
      {
        "translatedText": "Радужная машина разума расширяема, чтобы боты не становились скучными. Расширяются только два компонента. Эти два компонента имеют простой и понятный порядок вызовов функций. Машина Rainbow mind использует разумные значения по умолчанию."
      }
    ]
  }
}

So far, so good.