Babelfish(3)

📦
version 0.16 · 2 versions
, in fedora 43

💖 Babelfish(3) — WWW::Babelfish 💖

okay bestie, sit down, we're reading a manpage together and it's actually fun, I promise. This is Babelfish(3) from the User Contributed Perl Documentation — yes, section 3, the library-calls section, we're in our Perl era 💅

✨ NAME ✨

WWW::Babelfish — a Perl extension for translation via Babelfish or Google 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

use WWW::Babelfish;
$obj = new WWW::Babelfish( service => 'Babelfish', agent => 'Mozilla/8.0', proxy => 'myproxy' );
die( "Babelfish server unavailable\n" ) unless defined($obj);

$french_text = $obj->translate( 'source' => 'English',
                                'destination' => 'French',
                                'text' => 'My hovercraft is full of eels',
                                'delimiter' => "\n\t",
                                'ofh' => \*STDOUT );
die("Could not translate: " . $obj->error) unless defined($french_text);

@languages = $obj->languages;

the way this literally says "my hovercraft is full of eels" — a cultural icon, no notes 💀

🎀 DESCRIPTION 🎀

It's a Perl interface to the WWW babelfish translation server. That's it, that's the whole vibe. You speak Perl, it speaks every language. 🫶

👑 METHODS 👑

💜 new

Creates a shiny new WWW::Babelfish object. main character energy fr fr.

Parameters:

  • service — Babelfish, Google or Yahoo; default is Babelfish
  • agent — user agent string
  • proxy — proxy in the form of host:port

🌈 services

Returns a plain array of the services available (currently Babelfish, Google or Yahoo). plain array. no drama. we love that for us.

🦋 languages

Returns a plain array of the languages available for translation. slay ✨

🍓 languagepairs

Returns a reference to a hash of hashes. okay bestie stay with me:

  • The keys of the outer hash reflect all available languages.
  • The hashes that the corresponding values reference contain one (key) entry for each destination language that the particular source language can be translated to.
  • The values of these inner hashes contain the Babelfish option name for the language pair.
🚨 Do not modify the returned structure unless you really know what you're doing. Like, actually know. Not "I read half a tutorial" know. 🚨

Here's an example of a possible return value:

{
  'Chinese' => {
                 'English' => 'zh_en'
               },
  'English' => {
                 'Chinese' => 'en_zh',
                 'French' => 'en_fr',
                 'German' => 'en_de',
                 'Italian' => 'en_it',
                 'Japanese' => 'en_ja',
                 'Korean' => 'en_ko',
                 'Portuguese' => 'en_pt',
                 'Spanish' => 'en_es'
               },
  'French' => {
                'English' => 'fr_en',
                'German' => 'fr_de'
              },
  'German' => {
                'English' => 'de_en',
                'French' => 'de_fr'
              },
  'Italian' => {
                 'English' => 'it_en'
               },
  'Japanese' => {
                  'English' => 'ja_en'
                },
  'Korean' => {
                'English' => 'ko_en'
              },
  'Portuguese' => {
                    'English' => 'pt_en'
                  },
  'Russian' => {
                 'English' => 'ru_en'
               },
  'Spanish' => {
                 'English' => 'es_en'
               }
}

🌟 translate

Translates some text using Babelfish. the moment we've all been waiting for 💅

Parameters:

  • source — Source language
  • destination — Destination language
  • text — If this is a reference, translate interprets it as an open filehandle to read from. Otherwise, it is treated as a string to translate.
  • delimiter — Paragraph delimiter for the text; the default is "\n\n". Note that this is a string, not a regexp. (say it with me: not a regexp 🫠)
  • ofh — Output filehandle; if provided, the translation will be written to this filehandle.

Return value tea ☕:

  • If no ofh parameter is given, translate will return the text.
  • Otherwise it will return 1.
  • On failure it returns undef.

🙈 error

Returns a (hopefully) meaningful error string. "hopefully" is doing so much heavy lifting in that sentence and honestly? same. 😭

⭐ NOTES ⭐

real talk time, bestie.

Babelfish translates 1000 characters at a time. This module tries to break the source text into reasonable logical chunks of less than 1000 characters, feeds them to Babelfish and then reassembles them. Formatting may get lost in the process; also it's doubtful this will work for non-Western languages since it tries to key on punctuation. What would make this work is if perl had properly localized regexps for sentence/clause boundaries. so basically we're doing our best and our best is sometimes mid 💀

Support for Google is preliminary and hasn't been extensively tested (by me). Google's translations used to be suspiciously similar to Babelfish's, but now some people tell me they're superior. 👀 the DRAMA. the lore.

🧚 AUTHOR 🧚

Dan Urist, durist@frii.com — thank you for your service 🫡💖

🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

  • perl(1). go read it. it's giving foundational.

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this was perl v5.42.0 from 2025-07-25 and yeah it's literally labeled Babelfish(3) at the bottom like a little signature. mwah 💋 go translate something unhinged. periodt. 🎀✨

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