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Having recently moved to Germany, I receive tons of German emails.
My current workflow is definitely not efficient: Copy mail contents, goto translate.google.com, paste content..
The ideal solution would be: just trigger a shortcut and have the contents of the email translated into the predefined language you've set.
Would that be possible?
Here is an applescript I just put together that is working for me (10.9)
You can place it in the Applescript menu and run it on the selected Emails.
The script will:
You can set the original language to auto or one of the languages in the languages_code list. And also set the result language from the list.
There is no reason you should not be able to create a service using this script. But I will leave that to you. Just note that for the device to work you will need to right click/crtl +click in a message's body for the service menu to show up. Or use the Services menu.
#http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=31218
#http://macscripter.net/viewtopic.php?id=39742
#The above links are the starting points of this script which both attempt to translate text. But are broken or do not return the full text.
#This script will attampt to translate the text from the selected emails to your chosen language
property languages_code : {Afrikaans:"af", Albanian:"sq", Arabic:"ar", Belarusian:"be", Bulgarian:"bg", Catalan:"ca", Chinese:"zh-CN", Croatian:"hr", Czech:"cs", Danish:"da", Dutch:"nl", English:"en", Estonian:"et", Filipino:"tl", Finnish:"fi", French:"fr", Galician:"gl", German:"de", Greek:"el", Hebrew:"iw", Hindi:"hi", Hungarian:"hu", Icelandic:"is", Indonesian:"id", Irish:"ga", Italian:"it", Japanese:"ja", Korean:"ko", Latvian:"lv", Lithuanian:"lt", Macedonian:"mk", Malay:"ms", Maltese:"mt", Norwegian:"no", Persian:"fa", Polish:"pl", Portuguese:"pt", Romanian:"ro", Russian:"ru", Serbian:"sr", Slovak:"sk", Slovenian:"sl", Spanish:"es", Swahili:"sw", Swedish:"sv", Thai:"th", Turkish:"tr", Ukrainian:"uk", Vietnamese:"vi", Welsh:"cy", Yiddish:"yi"}
#Curl stuff
property agent : "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_2; en-us) AppleWebKit/531.21.8 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/4.0.4 Safari/531.21.10"
property charset : "UTF-8"
property header : "Charset:" & space & charset
property theURL : "https://translate.google.com/?" #This must be https
#used to delimit the html
property snipOpen : "TRANSLATED_TEXT="
property snipClose : ";INPUT_TOOL_PATH"
#You can either set a start language or leave it at auto.
property startLang : "auto"
#set a result language
property resultLang : English of languages_code
#Ask Mail to get and process selected emails
tell application "Mail"
set theMessages to (get selection)
repeat with i from 1 to number of items in theMessages
set this_item to item i of theMessages
set thisSender to sender of this_item
set thisSubject to subject of this_item
set thisText to content of this_item as string
my translate(thisSender, thisSubject, thisText)
end repeat
end tell
(*************** SUBROUTINES *****************)
#Translate the message text and display them in a temp text file
on translate(thisSender, thisSubject, thisText)
if thisText is not "" then
#replace all spaces with "%20" for the URL to use without error
set escapedText to findReplace(thisText, space, "%20")
#send request to google and get the returned HTML
set TranslatedText to do shell script "/usr/bin/curl" & space & ¬
"-A" & space & quoted form of agent & space & ¬
"-H" & space & quoted form of header & space & ¬
"-d" & space & quoted form of ("&ie=" & charset & "&oe=" & charset & "&langpair=" & startLang & "|" & resultLang & "&text=" & escapedText) & space & quoted form of theURL
try
#Use delimiters to split the text to just get the actual result part
set txt to Split(TranslatedText, snipOpen)'s item 2
set txt to Split(txt, snipClose)'s item 1
set displayText to ¬
"Sender: " & thisSender & "<br>" & ¬
"Subject: " & thisSubject & "<br>" & "<br>" & ¬
txt
#Use Textutil to strip any other rich text or HTML code out and convert to plain text. Then open in a text document
do shell script "echo " & quoted form of displayText & "|textutil -format html -convert txt -stdin -stdout | open -f"
on error errTxt number errNum
display dialog errTxt with title "Error# " & errNum buttons {"Cancel", "OK"} default button 2 with icon 0 giving up after 0
end try
end if
end translate
on Split(txt, del)
set {otid, AppleScript's text item delimiters} to {AppleScript's text item delimiters, del}
set txt to text items of txt
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to otid
return txt
end Split
on findReplace(theString, search_string, replacement_string)
if theString contains search_string then
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to search_string
set text_item_list to text items of theString
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to replacement_string
set theString to text_item_list as text
set AppleScript's text item delimiters to ""
end if
return theString
end findReplace
You can do this using the provided Apple application 'Automator' (you'll find it in the Applications folder) which allows you to do drag and drop type automation scripts. You could then assign the Automator action to a dedicated key combination.
You can even record the steps in Automator then clean them up to make it generic.
Automator and Applescript are two features of OS X that are very little known about but can help in exactly the sort of case you are looking at.
Website with info: http://www.macosxautomation.com/automator/
And creating services: http://www.automatedworkflows.com/2011/05/22/creating-applescript-services-in-mac-os-x/
Actually, I found this more convenient. Tested on El captain 10.11.5
Is it possible to bind my Mac OSX Dictionary.app to Google Translate?
Screenshot: http://puu.sh/pjWSz/6d26d3b1cd.png
