crow-translate

[!IMPORTANT]
The project has migrated under the KDE umbrella, and development will continue at https://invent.kde.org/office/crow-translate.

Crow Translate

Crow Translate is a simple and lightweight translator written in C++ / Qt that allows you to translate and speak text using Google, Yandex, Bing, LibreTranslate and Lingva translate API. You may also be interested in my library QOnlineTranslator used in this project.

Content

• Screenshots
• Features
• Default keyboard shortcuts
• CLI commands
• D-Bus API
• Global shortcuts in Wayland
• Dependencies
• Icons
• Installation
• Building
• Localization

Screenshots

Plasma

Plasma Mobile

Windows 10

Features

• Translate and speak text from screen or selection
• Support 125 different languages
• Low memory consumption (~20MB)
• Highly customizable shortcuts
• Command-line interface with rich options
• D-Bus API
• Available for Linux and Windows

Default keyboard shortcuts

You can change them in the settings. Some key sequences may not be available due to OS limitations.

Wayland does not support global shortcuts registration, but you can use D-Bus to bind actions in the system settings. For desktop environments that support additional applications actions (KDE, for example) you will see them predefined in the system shortcut settings. You can also use them for X11 sessions, but you need to disable global shortcuts registration in the application settings to avoid conflicts.

Global

In main window

CLI commands

The program also has a console interface.

Usage: crow [options] text

Note: If you do not pass startup arguments to the program, the GUI starts.

D-Bus API

io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate
├── /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/Ocr
|   └── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.Ocr.setParameters(QVariantMap parameters);
└── /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/MainWindow
    |   # Global shortcuts
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.translateSelection();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.speakSelection();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.speakTranslatedSelection();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.playPauseSpeaking();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.stopSpeaking();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.open();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.copyTranslatedSelection();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.recognizeScreenArea();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.translateScreenArea();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.delayedRecognizeScreenArea();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.delayedTranslateScreenArea();
    |   # Main window shortcuts
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.clearText();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.cancelOperation();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.swapLanguages();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.openSettings();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.setAutoTranslateEnabled(bool enabled);
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.copySourceText();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.copyTranslation();
    ├── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.copyAllTranslationInfo();
    └── method void io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.quit();

For example, you can show main window using dbus-send:

dbus-send --type=method_call --dest=io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/MainWindow io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.open

Or via qdbus:

qdbus io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/MainWindow io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate.MainWindow.open
# or shorter
qdbus io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/MainWindow open

Global shortcuts in wayland

Wayland doesn't provide API for global shortcuts and you need to register them by yourself.

KDE

KDE have a convenient feature to define shortcuts in .desktop file and import them in settings. These shortcuts are already enabled and should work by default.

GNOME

For GNOME you need to manually set D-Bus commands as global shortcuts. For example, to translate selected text use the following:

qdbus io.crow_translate.CrowTranslate /io/crow_translate/CrowTranslate/MainWindow translateSelection

You can set a hotkey for this command in GNOME system settings.

Dependencies

Required

• CMake 3.16+
• Extra CMake Modules
• Qt 5.9+ with Widgets, Network, Multimedia, Concurrent, X11Extras (Linux), DBus (Linux) and WinExtras (Windows) modules
• Tesseract 4.0+
• Png2Ico or IcoTool for generating executable icon (Windows)

Optional

• KWayland

External libraries

This project uses the following external libraries, which included as git submodules:

• QOnlineTranslator - provides free usage of Google, Yandex and Bing translate API.
• QGitTag - uses the GitHub API to provide information about releases.
• QHotkey - provides global shortcuts for desktop platforms.
• QTaskbarControl - to create a taskbar/launcher progress for all desktop platforms.
• SingleApplication - prevents launch of multiple application instances.

Icons

Fluent icon theme is bundled to provide icons on Windows and fallback icons on Linux.

circle-flags icons are used for flags.

Installation

Downloads are available on the Releases page. Also check out the website for other installation methods.

Note: On Linux to make the application look native on a non-KDE desktop environment, you need to configure Qt applications styling. This can be done by using qt5ct or adwaita-qt5 or qtstyleplugins. Please check the appropriate installation guide for your distribution.

Note: Windows requires Microsoft Visual C++ Redistributable 2019 to work.

Building

Building executable

You can build Crow Translate by using the following commands:

mkdir build
cd build
cmake .. # Or `cmake -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..` for s