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Use Microsoft Cognitive Services Translate API in Android using Java

I recently implemented the MS Cognitive Services Translate API for Wordee. I switched to it after trying Google Translate API and I did that for two reasons:
  1. Microsoft's API is better documented.
  2. Google's API costs twice the MS's API.
Now, it was difficult to find a complete tutorial / example of how to implement the MS REST API in Android using Java, so I decided to share the first (and simplest, but flexible) version of that implementation.

The application I uploaded to illustrate the example consists of a Spinner to select the target language,  an EditText to enter the text you want to translate, a Button to perform the translation request and a TextView to show the translated text. The API automatically detects the source language.

This example is fully functional, you only need to provide a valid API key.


There are also two important things to clarify in this example. First, we saved the languages in a JSON file, that we have to retrieve and parse in order to populate the Spinner. Second, we have to perform the translation using an Async task, or we'll get a NetworkOnMainThreadException.

Do not forget to protect your API key and, of course, never upload it to public repositories.

Public repository on Github.


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