roundtrip

Round-trip translation, aka back-translation, using Google's Translate API.

Why

Data Augmentation - translating a phrase to another language and back, called back-translation, is a good way to generate more training data for NLP models.

Notice

The CLI is just a hack for one-off examples. It uses the API in a way that may not have been intended. For any large-scale translation, you should use the Cloud Translation API which is fast and reasonably priced.

If the ENV variable GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is set, it will use the official Google Translate API with the credentials it finds in GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS.

Usage

Install

pip install roundtrip

To play around on the CLI, use like this:

Usage:
$ roundtrip text_to_translate to_lang from_lang
from_lang is optional
to_lang is required
Example:
$ roundtrip "Returns the translation using google translate you must shortcut the language you define" fr
Returns the translation using Google Translate, you must shorten the language you set

However, if you want to call from myscript.py:

from roundtrip import backtranslate

back = backtranslate("this is a phrase in my NLP training data", "de")
print(back)
>>> "This is a sentence in my NLP training data"

# now go augment your training data

If the env var GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS is set, the python snippet above will use the official translate API and you will be charged. So call it like this:

$ GOOGLE_APPLICATION_CREDENTIALS='/home/users/example.json' myscript.py

You get the credential file from The Google Cloud Console.

Developing

If you want to add to this package, be aware that the package_and_release.sh script is pretty janky. Currently you need to bump the version and git commit by hand.