Get Chinese Romanization from Google Translate API

Question

The Google language translate API works cleanly to translate into Chinese:

<script type="text/javascript" src="http://www.google.com/jsapi"></script>
<script>
  google.load('language','1');
  function googletrans(text) {
    google.language.translate(text,'en','zh',function(result) {
      alert(result.translation);
    });
  }
</script>
<input onchange="googletrans(this.value);">
Example input: "Hello"
Result: "你好"

My problem is I can't get the Romanization (pronunciation using English letters). This is a known issue.

Now the data is right there on translate.google.com (Example input: "Hello" Result: "Nǐ hǎo") and I can even see it by pointing my browser to:

http://translate.google.com/translate_a/t?client=t&text=hello&hl=en&sl=en&tl=zh-CN&otf=2&pc=0
Result:
{"sentences":[{"trans":"你好","orig":"hello","translit":"Nǐ hǎo"}],
 "dict":[{"pos":"interjection","terms":["喂"]}],"src":"en"}

But somehow when I try to get this URL with ajax it fails (XMLHttpRequest Exception 101). Is there any way to retrieve this Romanization data with ajax?

Alysaalyse

Answer 1

It doesn't appear possible today, but there are open issues on the Google Translate API to address this. If we can rally enough people around the issue, perhaps Google will raise its priority:

1) http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=478&q=label%3AAPIType-Language&sort=-stars&colspec=ID%20Type%20Stars%20Status%20Modified%20Summary%20APIType%20Opened

2) http://code.google.com/p/google-ajax-apis/issues/detail?id=381&q=label%3AAPIType-Language&sort=-stars&colspec=ID%20Type%20Stars%20Status%20Modified%20Summary%20APIType%20Opened

Ingres