Universal Translator

If you’ve ever tried to communicate with someone who only spoke a foreign language, you know that it can be extremely difficult — even with the help of modern translation websites. This project will show you how to turn a $35 mini-computer into a feature-rich language translator that not only supports voice recognition and native speaker playback, but is also capable of translating between thousands of language pairs. The unbelievable part is that it can all be done on the cheap by leveraging inexpensive hardware, free translation APIs, and some open source software.

Even if you’re not interested in building this exact translation tool, there are still many parts of this project that might be interesting to you such as Google’s speech recognition API, Microsoft’s translation API, and text to speech. All of the source code for this project is publicly available on Github, and you’re welcome to use and modify it as you wish. The Universal Translator makes a perfect weekend project because it incorporates a wide range of technology and tools to create something immediately useful. Oh, and it’s a blast to play with.

Pick up all the parts at your local RadioShack, follow the instructions below, and you’ll have your own babel fish in no time.

Peter Ruffini

Dave, does it translate “stupid”? I have a hard time understanding that and haven’t been successful in finding a translation solution. :-) Seriously though, this is pretty cool!
- Dave Conroy
  
  Peter, that is scheduled for version 2.0!
- nomasteryoda
  
  Stupid like Vogon sir?
  Vogon poetry
  translated much wow!
  - MerleEMoore
    
    my neigbour just got a nice year old Mercedes-Benz just by some part-time working online with a cheap laptop. Learn More earndollars.com
MAC

Well done sir.
Yuliyan Ilev

Is there a way to make a physical button to execute the ./stt.sh ? I am planning to use this in an exhibition and it would be amazing if people yould just press a button istead of typing command lines. I am sure it is not hard to make but i have no idea how. The kind of button i´d like to use is a usb buzzer like that. bit.ly/1wiuzQn Could you help me?
- Luis
  
  Using GPIO would be the way. Check this project, should give you a way to start: https://learn.adafruit.com/playing-sounds-and-using-buttons-with-raspberry-pi/install-audio
- Kevin Osborn
  
  You can use GPIO, but for ease of hooking things like this up, I like to use a teensy embedded in the button/button panel, that can then be hooked via USB. Teensy can do USB serial, (and your pi program can read that) or you can actually have it emulate a keyboard.
ShakeSpear

Awesome tutorial. I followed it up and I got almost everything to work. I don’t have USB Microphone, I have the Apple Headphones (with Mic) and I also ave just mic. I couldn’t seem to be able to test my mic and at the end I got this error: http://prntscr.com/4mm63z

I took a screenshot to ease the explaining pain.
- codingkid.ninja
  
  The RPi does not support mic input on the headphone jack. Sorry.
Amanda Odena

A “stupid” translator? I’ll take one!
Ian Burgess

What a fantastic project. I completed it in such a small amount of time, and yet the payoff is so huge. I am going to redo it with my young kids and get them introduced to the RasPi, APIs, and the framework of modular programming. Great stuff, Dave!
ppolstra

A note on power. I did a lot of research on power requirements for small computer boards while writing Hacking and Penetration Testing with Low Power Devices (Syngress, 2014). The more energy efficient BeagleBone Black with a wireless adapter will only run about 7.5 hours off of AA batteries. The Pi is not nearly as efficient and will likely get your 4-5 hours off of the AA batteries on a good day. So if you want to make the translator portable be prepared to spend some cash on the batteries. Incidentally, moving up to C sells with better than triple the run time.
Guest

my headphones won’t show up and I rebooted. Ideas?
P.S. they work fine on my desktop
Alin

I used a “translate Api” and it is translating the feed back too. It won’t here my speech so I think I need to use the speech Api but I could not find it? It wasn’t listed. Can you help me.
- rafi
  
  you need to join the Chromium-dev Google Group the link is in the page
Alin

I keep getting an error saying cannot find an active azure marketplace translator subscription associated with the requested credentials: ID=3627.V2_Json.Translate.556BCC47
Rajamani Vinayagam

Dave, I have tried your code, am getting follwing error while trying to execute speech to text.. please advise on this..
- marcus evans
  
  was there an answer to this? i’ve come across the same problem
  - Rajamani Vinayagam
    
    Copy & pasting Speech API key solved my problem..
  - C Johnson
    
    I’m having that same problem too.
ADITYA MHAMUNKAR

thank you so much sir for providing such useful information and project which we can use in our day to day life.
our universal translator is running successfully ,but sometimes due to some ssl certificate issue it does not operate but after rebooting it operates succesfully.
Patricia Suarez Valero

Hi!!! I’ve got an error:
/usr/local/lib/python2.7/dist-packages/requests/packages/urllib3/util/ssl_.py:79 InsecurePlatformWarning: A true SSLContext object is not available. This prevents urllib3 from configuring SSL appropriately and may certain SSL connections to fail. For more information, see http://urllib3.readthedocs.org/en/latest/security.html#insecureplatformwarning.
InsecurePlatformWarning
Traceback (most recent call last):
File “PiTranslate.py”, line 64, in
headers={‘Authorization’:’Bearer’+oauth_junk[‘access_token’]}
KeyError:’access_token’

And I don’t know why can you help me??
- TheZippyTurtle
  
  Me to. Someone please help us!!
michael carlton

I’m having trouble linking the APIs to the Pi I
downloaded the code and gave it the necessary data. I used 3 Google accounts
and all 3 didn’t work
吳亦鈞

Hi this system is very success on my RPi2 but now i have some question
“You can easily change your origin and destination languages in the last line of text-to-translate.py ”
So I come from Taiwan ，I want to change to Chinese
” os.system(“python PiTranslate.py -o en -d es -t ‘” + final_result + “‘”) ”
Is that en and es change to ch ch?
C Johnson

my pi spat out an error message along the lines of InsecurePlatformWarning
file “PiTranslate.py” line 47 in
KeyError: ‘access_token’
I am new to Raspberry Pi, so I have no idea what it means. Has anyone else had the same problem?
- TheZippyTurtle
  
  Me to someone please help!
Ash Shah

I keep trying to test out the record of my headset but it shows

arecord; main;682; audio open error; No such file or directory

How to fix?
Hari Shankar

can i use
9 mm Headset Driver Units
if yes pls sent the ALSA configuration file in [email protected]
Sridhar Cp

Joining the chromium dev group does not give access to speech api now.
Any other alternative?
Lisa Brown

dave i cannot get my usb sound card as primary using mod alsa_base.cong when opened just a blank file. I read somewhere else that raspbian jesse does not use this file Could you please provide some help.
Delta Omega

Did everything as stated; I get an error that says:
“arecord: pcm_read:2031: read error: Interrupted system call”
Any idea what could fix that?

(Im using Rpi 3)
prakriti mukhopadhyay

i plugged my usb logitech headset in,it does not detect it at all,help please!I tried to reboot aswell.

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Parts

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Steps

Step #1: Set up Raspberry Pi and Download Software

Step #2: Configure and Test Headset

Step #3: Download and Extract Source Code

Step #4: Set up Google Speech Recognition API

Step #5: Set up Microsoft Translation API

Step #6: Use the Universal Translator

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Universal Translator

Parts

Tools

Steps

Step #1: Set up Raspberry Pi and Download Software

Step #2: Configure and Test Headset

Step #3: Download and Extract Source Code

Step #4: Set up Google Speech Recognition API

Step #5: Set up Microsoft Translation API

Step #6: Use the Universal Translator

Dave Conroy

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