How to propertly use Bing Translate API? - api

Question

I'm using the API of Bing, more precisely - the translation part, and it all works quite well except one thing - auto detection of language. How is that possible?
My code is working fine,incase someone needs to look at:
function HTTPEncode(const AStr: string): string;
const
NoConversion = ['A'..'Z', 'a'..'z', '*', '#', '.', '_', '-'];
var
i: integer;
begin
Result := '';
for i := 1 to Length(AStr) do
begin
if CharInSet(AStr[i],NoConversion) then
Result := Result + AStr[i]
else
Result := Result + Format('%%%.2x',[ord(AStr[i])]);
end;
end;
function GetTranslation(text, fromLang, toLang: string): string;
var
xmldoc: TXMLDocument;
inode,mnode,rnode,irnode: IXMLNode;
j: integer;
uri: string;
idhttp:TIdHttp;
begin
Result := '';
idhttp:=TIdHttp.Create(nil);
xmldoc := TXMLDocument.Create(application);
try
xmldoc.LoadFromXML(idhttp.Get('http://api.search.live.net/xml.aspx?Appid=' + AppID + '&query='+HTTPEncode(text)+
'&sources=translation'+
'&Translation.SourceLanguage=' + fromLang +
'&Translation.TargetLanguage=' + toLang));
finally
idhttp.Free;
end;
try
inode := xmldoc.ChildNodes.FindNode('SearchResponse');
if Assigned(inode) then
begin
uri := 'http://schemas.microsoft.com/LiveSearch/2008/04/XML/translation';
mnode := inode.ChildNodes.FindNode('Translation',uri);
if Assigned(mnode) then
begin
rnode := mnode.ChildNodes.FindNode('Results',uri);
if Assigned(rnode) then
begin
irnode := rnode.ChildNodes.FindNode('TranslationResult',uri);
if Assigned(irnode) then
Result := irnode.ChildNodes.FindNode('TranslatedTerm',uri).NodeValue;
end;
end;
end;
finally
xmldoc.Free;
end;
end;
begin
ShowMessage(GetTranslation('Hello!','en','de'));
end;
I followed the packets from http://www.microsofttranslator.com/ when using auto-detection feature, the result was 'from=;' whereas if source language is English it'd be 'from=en;'.I tried aswell sending '' as source language,but it didn't work out - no result.
How do I use auto-detection?

Answer 1

I did this using their Ajax API. If you build your query with a null "from" parameter, then the service auto-detects the language.
This is the query url I format to make requests to the service:
#"http://api.microsofttranslator.com/V2/Ajax.svc/Translate?appId={0}&from=&to={1}&text={2}"
Key thing being "from=&to={1}".

Answer 2

Here is an example for API version 3:
no from parameter
English text
detectedLanguage results in en
I read score as 100% sure about this result
$ curl -X POST "https://api.cognitive.microsofttranslator.com/translate?api-version=3.0&textType=html&to=fr" \
-d "[{'Text':'Underbeds'}]"> -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Key:YOUR_KEY_HERE" \
> -H "Ocp-Apim-Subscription-Region:global" \
> -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
> -d "[{'Text':'Underbeds'}]"
[{"detectedLanguage":{"language":"en","score":1.0},"translations":[{"text":"Sous-lits","to":"fr"}]}]