Translation practice based on grabbing tweets in the desired language and feeding through google translate and speaking the text.

readme.md

Twitter Translation Practice

This project was conceived with the idea of getting some real world language practice.

Installation

1. Install the required gems.

gem install google-translate
gem install twitter
gem install colorize

2. Open ttp.rb and set your twitter application OAuth credentials.
   You can register an application with Twitter here.

Usage

1. Set the search_text variable on line 69.
2. Set the TO_LANG and FROM_LANG options on line 18 & 19
3. Set the NO_SAY variable one line 17 to true if you dont want the tweet read out.
4. Run the script with ruby tpp.rb

Future work

• add a command line wrapper with options to specify search text, etc
  • option to use a user or set of users tweets.
  • option to specify source language in twitter seach and google translate
  • option to specify output language of google translate
• get and store search results to reduce API usage.
• method for changing search text while running.

ttp.rb

require 'twitter'
require 'google_translate'
require 'colorize'

SEPARATOR = "@------------------------@"
URI_REGEX = %r"((?:(?:[^ :/?#]+):)(?://(?:[^ /?#]*))(?:[^ ?#]*)(?:\?(?:[^ #]*))?(?:#(?:[^ ]*))?)"
# http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6368659/removing-url-from-text-using-ruby

SKIP = 'n'

# get these values by registering at https://apps.twitter.com/
CONSUMER_KEY = ""
CONSUMER_SECRET = ""
ACCESS_TOKEN = ""
ACCESS_SECRET = ""

NO_SAY = false
TO_LANG = :en
FROM_LANG = :de

def print_separator
  puts SEPARATOR.white
end

def strip_links(text)
  text.gsub(URI_REGEX, '')
end

def create_twitter_client
  Twitter::REST::Client.new do |config|
    config.consumer_key        = CONSUMER_KEY
    config.consumer_secret     = CONSUMER_SECRET
    config.access_token        = ACCESS_TOKEN
    config.access_token_secret = ACCESS_SECRET
  end
end

def use_tweet(tweet_text)

  print_separator
  
  tweet_text = strip_links(tweet_text)

  translator = GoogleTranslate.new
  result = translator.translate(FROM_LANG, TO_LANG, tweet_text)

  translation = result[0][0][0]

  puts "Tweet Text (#{FROM_LANG}): #{tweet_text}".magenta

  translator.say(FROM_LANG, tweet_text) unless NO_SAY

  puts "What is your translation of the above tweet? ('n' to skip)"
  your_translation = gets.chomp

  if your_translation.eql? SKIP
    puts "Skipping tweet"
    return
  end

  puts
  puts "Google Translation: #{translation}".light_green
  puts "Your translation: #{your_translation}".cyan
end

client = create_twitter_client

# Set search_text to your desired search terms. The '-rt' means filter out retweets.
search_text = "tech -rt"

puts "Welcome to Twitter Translation Practice."
puts "Translating tweets with the search '#{search_text}' from #{FROM_LANG} to #{TO_LANG}"
puts 

while true 
  tweet_text = client.search(search_text, :lang => FROM_LANG.to_s).each do |tweet|
    use_tweet(tweet.text)
  end
end