Machine Translation from AWS Translate

aws.translate is a package for AWS Translate, an Amazon Web Services machine translation web service.

Code Examples

The basic use of the package is super simple and revolves around the translate() function, which takes a character string as input. The result is a character string with 2 attributes: SourceLanguageCode and TargetLanguageCode.

library("aws.translate")

# translate some text from English
translate("Hello world!", from = "en", to = "fr")

## [1] "Bonjour le monde !"
## attr(,"SourceLanguageCode")
## [1] "en"
## attr(,"TargetLanguageCode")
## [1] "fr"

# translate some text to English
translate("Hola mundo!", from = "auto", to = "en")

## [1] "Hello world!"
## attr(,"SourceLanguageCode")
## [1] "es"
## attr(,"TargetLanguageCode")
## [1] "en"

Setting up credentials

To use the package, you will need an AWS account and to enter your credentials into R. Your keypair can be generated on the IAM Management Console under the heading Access Keys. Note that you only have access to your secret key once. After it is generated, you need to save it in a secure location. New keypairs can be generated at any time if yours has been lost, stolen, or forgotten. The aws.iam package profiles tools for working with IAM, including creating roles, users, groups, and credentials programmatically; it is not needed to use IAM credentials.

A detailed description of how credentials can be specified is provided at: https://github.com/cloudyr/aws.signature/. The easiest way is to simply set environment variables on the command line prior to starting R or via an Renviron.site or .Renviron file, which are used to set environment variables in R during startup (see ? Startup). They can be also set within R:

Sys.setenv("AWS_ACCESS_KEY_ID" = "mykey",
           "AWS_SECRET_ACCESS_KEY" = "mysecretkey",
           "AWS_DEFAULT_REGION" = "us-east-1",
           "AWS_SESSION_TOKEN" = "mytoken")

Installation

You can install this package from CRAN or, to install the latest development version, from the cloudyr drat repository:

# Install from CRAN
install.packages("aws.translate)

# Latest version passing CI tests, from drat repo
install.packages("aws.translate", repos = c(getOption("repos"), "http://cloudyr.github.io/drat"))

You can also pull a potentially unstable version directly from GitHub, using the remotes package:

remotes::install_github("cloudyr/aws.translate")

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