Glide App for translation using Google Translate in Google Sheets

I have written a couple of posts about translation Glide apps for bus tour, art Gallery & museums. Initially I used the web page to translate individual cells to a different language, then used uploading a whole document to do the translation.

While looking through the Glide Apps community posts here I came across this translation app: https://translationbuddy.glideapp.io/ by Amit Sarda who was posting about Google Sheet Scripts onEdit(e) function. Item here.

First off, I thought it was a cool app. I liked the idea of choosing a from language and a to language. Very well thought out.

Second, I thought, there must be a function that is doing the translation, on the fly as such.

Third, Amit Sarda is using Google Sheets Scripts, which is what I’ve been playing with for email notifications and moving rows between sheets. The onEdit(e) function is not working properly on his app.

So, for the second item I thought I’d google to see if there is a translation function in Google Sheets, and there is. I found this article that discusses it. You use , in a cell:

=googletranslate(B2,”en”,”es”) , =GOOGLETRANSLATE(text, [source_language, target_language])

This was great, until i tried guessing some different languages 2 letter code, eg Chinese, I thought “ch” (NOPE), in fact, some of them are quite wierd, Chinese is in fact ZH, go figure. So I went looking for the 2 letter language codes, and came across this article that shows them:

2 letter language codes: https://www.sitepoint.com/iso-2-letter-language-codes

So, I had a wee play with those in a spreadsheet, just using the original text from one of the museum apps I was developing, pointing to a cell with all the English text in and setting the TO language option. It works well, but chews it over a bit.

Workflow process

I would set up a sheet with all the languages that you want to translate and let google chew through the functions , then I’d copy the contents of the sheet and save it to a different App spreadsheet and PASTE VALUES into that sheet (you do not want the sheet with all the functions in it or it may have to load and process them each time you use the app. This would be a high overhead for a mobile app, so use KISS principle.

I’d possibly have a couple of cells that you could change from one language to another as there would not be too much processing for that to take place within the main mobile app sheet (although I’d have to test that).