REPL

Tutorial

Welcome to the Interactive Translate Shell! Here you can translate any text into any language interactively.

This short tutorial will walk you through the basic usage of the REPL.

Start an interactive session:

$ trans -shell

Now let's do some translation: (suppose your locale is English and you are trying to translate an Italian word "mondo")

> mondo
mondo

world

Definitions of mondo
[ Italiano -> English ]

noun
    world
        mondo, terra
    earth
        terra, mondo, massa, terreno, suolo, globo
    universe
        universo, mondo
    society
        società, mondo, associazione, compagnia, circolo
    a world of
        mondo

adjective
    cleaned
        mondo

If the above translation is not enough for you, you may :set the value of show-original-dictionary to 1 so that the dictionary entry of the original Italian word is shown as well:

> :set show-original-dictionary 1
> mondo

Or, to the contrary, if the above translation is too verbose for you, you can just turn off the verbose mode: (i.e. turn on the brief mode)

> :set verbose 0
> mondo

Bring the verbose mode back:

> :set verbose 1

To find out what the actual value of a specific setting is, use the :show command:

> :show verbose

If you are an Italian speaker looking at the English definition of the word "mondo", un sostantivo may be more likable than a noun. So why not just set your home language to Italian? (unless your locale is already Italian, of course)

> :set hl it
> mondo

It's even easier to set the source language and the target language(s): (same old syntax)

> it:fr
Italiano>

Notice that the prompt changed itself to "Italiano>", which means that the source language has been set to Italian explicitly. Your input will now be translated into French, as specified by the previous command:

Italiano> mondo
monde

Let's change the target language once more: (Japanese, this time)

Italiano> :ja
Italiano> mondo
世界

A shorter way of doing this:

Italiano> :de mondo
Welt

Use the :engine command to switch the translation engine:

> :engine bing

Lastly, the :quit (:q) command is for you to quit the REPL elegantly.