A powerful, secure and feature-rich command line via Google Translation.

English | 简体中文

📖 Introduction

Using the node-translate API in the terminal.

The API bypasses token restrictions. If it is used in large quantities or for business, please support the work of Google Translation, which provides a lot of free credits.

[11/25/2025] I add the Microsoft translation engine in the 1.4.0 version to deal with the problem that Google Translate does not provide services to the newtworks of some countries or regions. Although there is no rich output, at least users in these regions can use it. Enjoy it ;)

Besides simple text translation, it also provides:

• Auto-detect system language as target language
• Spell autocorrect
• Getting source text from stdin
• Polysemous translation results
• Synonyms of the source text
• Example sentences of the source text
• Phonetic transcription of the source and translated text
• Stable output and error prompts
• Beautiful terminal styling
• Internationalized prompt for terminal

⚙️ Installation

npm install @kabeep/node-translate-cli --save

yarn add @kabeep/node-translate-cli

pnpm add @kabeep/node-translate-cli

🚀 Usage

translate <text> [options]
options：
-f, --from The source language (language to be translated from)
specified as language name or ISO 639-1 code
[string] [default: "auto"]
-t, --to The target language (language to be translated to)
specified as language name or ISO 639-1 code
-e, --engine Select translation engine
[string] [choices: "google", "microsoft"] [default: "google"]
[string] [default: "auto"]
--timeout Timeout duration for the translation request in
milliseconds [number] [default: 30000]
--stdin-timeout You can use this parameter to avoid timeouts if stdin
takes too long (ms) [number] [default: 5000]
-r, --retry Retry attempts for the translation request in case of
failure [number] [default: 0]
-p, --show-phonetics Show the pronunciation of the translated word
[boolean] [default: false]
-s, --show-source Show source text information [boolean] [default: false]
-d, --show-detail Show translated detail information [boolean] [default: false]
-l, --show-list Show supported language list [boolean] [default: false]
--show-code Show supported language code list [boolean] [default: false]
--show-adaptive Show adaptive language [boolean] [default: false]
-v, --version Show version [boolean]
-h, --help Show help info [boolean]

Environment Variables

Name	Description
NODE_TRANSLATE_CLI_ENGINE	Specify the translation engine through env variable

🪄 Examples

Using stdin

echo"test"| translate -f en -t zh

Using iso-639-1 and text parameters

translate "test" --from=en --to=zh

Using language name and capitalized correction

translate "test" --from="ENGLISH" --to="chinese"

Adaptive source language

translate "test" -t zh

Self-detection of native language

translate "test" -f en

Autocorrect source text

translate "Thunk you"

Translate words and show synonyms, polysemy explanations and examples

translate "test" -d

Translate a word, phrase or sentence and show the source text and phonetic symbols

translate "test" -s -p

Set API timeout

translate "test" --timeout=60000

Set the timeout for the standard input stream

npm view node-translate-cli description | translate --stdin-timeout=30000

Set the number of retries when an API request fails

translate "test" -r 2

Show supported languages

translate -l

Show supported language codes

translate --show-code

Show supported adaptive languages

translate --show-adaptive

Show help information

translate -h

Show the version of current

translate -v

🧙🏽‍♂️ Advanced

Using another npm package

npm install -g clipboard-cli
# Use the clipboard-cli to copy translation results to the clipboard
translate 'Translate this sentence to your clipboard'| clipboard

Using the static accessor $() method

git commit -m "$(translate 'feat: your commit content' -t zh)"

Using the pipe | symbol

npm info npm description | translate -t zh

Using the redirection > symbol

translate "这是一段测试文本。" -t en > usage.txt

Translate The Rust-lang Book into your language

curl https://raw.githubusercontent.com/rust-lang/book/master/src/ch01-00-getting-started.md | translate

🔧 Autocorrect

Default: white background

Correct Spelling: yellow background

Detect Language: red background

🐢 Network anomaly

When the network is abnormal, the terminal will change as shown in the figure below (they actually come from the same line).

⌨️ Automatic line wrapping

When a single line of content is too long, the terminal will automatically wrap the line after the title.

🌐 i18n

Quickly contribute your language via ease-to-use node-translate-i18n in locale file are welcome, or notify me via Issues for handling.

🔗 Related

• node-translate - 🦜 A powerful, secure and feature-rich api via Google Translation.
• node-translate-i18n - 🌏 A command-line interface tool for translating localization files to other languages.
• google-translate-cli - Google Translate via CLI.

🤝 Contribution

Contributions via Pull Requests or Issues are welcome.

📄 License

This project is licensed under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for details.