Network Programming in .NET

Ever since Google started charging for it’s Translation API, and Microsoft put a 2 Million character limit on their free translation API, then you have to start looking outside of the USA for a free translation service. That’s when I discovered the Russian translation service provided by Yandex. They also do plenty of other languages, (Albanian Armenian Azerbaijani Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Croatian Czech Danish Dutch Estonian Finnish French German Greek Hungarian Italian Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Norwegian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swedish Turkish Ukrainian)

So, the first step is to go to http://api.yandex.com/translate/ and sign up for a Yandex Passport, and get an API key.

Then, I created a C# class with a static method to do the translation from code:

public static string Translate(string word, string language)
{
string strUrl = “https://translate.yandex.net/api/v1.5/tr.json/translate?”;
strUrl += “key=trnsl.1.1……..”;
strUrl += “&lang=en-” + language;
strUrl += “&text=” + word;
WebClient wc = new WebClient();
wc.Encoding = Encoding.UTF8;
string strJson = wc.DownloadString(strUrl);
….
}

This returns a JSON string in the format:

{
“code”: 200,
“lang”: “en-ru”,
“text”: [
“Быть или не быть?”,
“Вот в чем вопрос.”
]
}

So, to de-serialize this to a C# object, I used a class generated from http://json2csharp.com/ as follows:

public class RootObject
{
public int code { get; set; }
public string lang { get; set; }
public List<string> text { get; set; }
}

Then the de-serialization can take place at the end of the translate method:

System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer js = new System.Web.Script.Serialization.JavaScriptSerializer();
RootObject ro = js.Deserialize<RootObject>(strJson);
return ro.text[0];

A quirk I noticed when doing this as a console app, was that the console could not write our Cyrillic characters. There is a way around this by using the Windows API, but I just used a MessageBox.