Auto translation with GOOGLETRANSLATE is not working

Question

The issue is simple, when I try to do auto translate from English to a detected language I got an error, the formula is:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; "auto")

and the error is something like

Error, Google Translate does not support translation from en to pl-PL.

The problem (I think) is that GOOGLETRANSLATE is supposed to get language as two letter code when default value is language + country code (which is not supported https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093331?hl=en)

Is it possible to fix that? I would like to translate to user's language (so I want to use "auto" value), no matter what is the language and I assume that if the problem occurs for one language it will happen for different one.

This is not an issue, I want auto-translation to users language, even if I use it like this `=GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat";"en";"auto")` I got the same error message, `auto` suppose to be converted to local language which, in case of Google Spreadsheet, is "pl-PL" (in my case), which is wrong because this language format is not supported. Manual language support works but what if I want share something with users from a lot of other countries. — outlying, Jan 26 '18 at 21:09

score 6 · Answer 1 · edited Feb 26 '19 at 10:02

6

Have you tried to use ; instead of ,.

Example:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1 ; "auto"; "bg")

edited Feb 26 '19 at 10:02

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answered Feb 26 '19 at 09:58

Tanyo Ivanov

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I'm not sure why did this answer get more upvotes, in the original question I posted a formula with `;` – outlying Mar 15 '22 at 13:59
Because, usually the formulas are using comas (,) like the SUM formula for example. But this formula uses semicolon (;) and most of the time we are trying the first way. I searched long time after I found why it is. – Tanyo Ivanov Mar 15 '22 at 14:09

score 1 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 01 '18 at 09:24

I have the same issue for Russian. The formula =GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; "auto") gives the error:

Google Translate does not support translating from en to ru-RU.

This is Google issue, the best way is to report it:

Menu: Help > Report a problem

Here's a workaround:

make a script to detect sheet's locale.
use regex to extract first part of a locale string.

Here's the sample code:

function getLocale()
{
  var locale = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getSpreadsheetLocale(); // pl_PL    
  return /(.*)_/.exec(locale)[1]; // pl
}

The usage:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; getLocale())

score 1 · Answer 3 · answered Sep 22 '22 at 09:21

auto-translate is supported only for these 16 locales:


brazil	germany	mexico	spain
canada (english)	hong kong	philippines	taiwan
china	italy	portugal	united kingdom
france	japan	south korea	united states

see more at: https://stackoverflow.com/a/73767720/5632629

Auto translation with GOOGLETRANSLATE is not working

3 Answers3