Overview
Translate API looks up a word in a dictionary and returns all translations ordered by frequency.
The API translates from and to German for the following languages:
English, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Italian, and Czech.
Translate API allows to filter by word class and by minimum frequency.
How to use Linguatools Translate API
Connect to API
URL parameters:GET /?langpair={lang1-lang2}&query={word}&wortart={wordclass}&min_freq={number}
Only parameters langpair and query are required.
parameter | description | parameter value |
---|---|---|
query | any word (case insensitive) | e.g. change |
langpair |
Source and target language. E.g. One of the following combinations (in lower case): |
de-en, de-es, de-nl, de-pl, de-it, de-cs, |
wortart (optional) |
One of the following parts of speech (in upper case): | ADJ, ADV, AUX, EIGENNAME, ITJ, PHRASE, PRON, PREP, PREP_ART, PTK, KONJ, MODAL, NOMEN, NUM, VERB |
min_freq (optional) | minimum frequency. Can be any number > 0 | 1, 2, 3, 75334 , etc. |
Parts of speech:
ADJ
: adjectiveADV
: adverbAUX
: auxiliary verbEIGENNAME
: proper nounITJ
: interjectionPHRASE
: phrasePRON
: pronounPREP
: prepositionPREP_ART
: amalgamation of preposition and articlePTK
: particleKONJ
: conjunctionMODAL
: modal verbNOMEN
: nounNUM
: numeral (number word)VERB
: verb
Test the API
Test the test API with:
- langpair: en-de
- query: change
- wortart:
VERB
(optional)
You can test the API and develop your own application – for free, with
- our test Translate API on Heroku OR
- after sign up in RapidAPI
-
Heroku
http request
https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB
wget "https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB"
Important note (!)::
The initial API call might take up to 30 seconds because the heroku dyno falls asleep after 30 minutes of inactivity.
(The test API runs on a free heroku dyno.)
Further limits of the test API
The test API contains only a subset of the complete dictionary database. Therefore only high frequent translations are included (Top 1,000 for every language pair).
E.g.: change, buy, do and make in lang: de-en.
2. RapidAPI
https://rapidapi.com/petapro/api/linguatools-translate
Advantage: Access to the full dictionary database (with limited requests, see section ‚Pricing‘)
API response
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[ { "id":24728, "l1_text":"ändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"...", "synonyme2":"...", "freq":27459 } ] |
l1_text: german word
l2_text: translation of the german word
wortart: word class (part of speech) (NOMEN (=noun), ADJ, VERB, ADVERB)
synonyme1: „Synonyms“ for the translation of the German word, created by collecting the alternative translations. For instance, the words car, auto, automobile, motor vehicle, motorcar are all translations of the German word Auto and thus can be regarded as „synonyms“. Another word for this is back-translations.
synomyme2: „Synonyms“ for the German word, created by collecting alternative translations of the translation of the German word.
bed1: additional information describing the meaning of the l1 word. Currently only for 2,800 entries in the de-cs language pair.
bed2: additional information describing the meaning of the l2 word. Currently only for 2,800 entries in the de-cs language pair.
sentences: list of up to 20 bilingual example sentences for the entry. The l1_text and l2_text in the examples sentences are highlighted with bold HTML tags (<b>…</b>). Any occurrences of the characters „<“ and „>“ in the sentences have been replaced with their HTML entities („<“ and „>“) to produce well-formed HTML. Currently, example sentences are only available for the German-Czech language pair.
freq: The number specifies how often the translation was used in our database of translated documents. The higher the number the more common the translation.
Note: Since there is always noise in the dictionary sources as well as in the translated documents, in order to make sure that you only get correct translations you can set the query parameter min_freq (minimum frequency) to 1 to get only translations that have occurred at least once in our corpus. Compare the result of the two api calls with and without min_freq:
Without min_freq:https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB
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[ { "id":24728, "l1_text":"ändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"alter, alternate, amend, change, modify, transform, vary", "synonyme2":"abändern, auswechseln, erneuern, modifizieren, schalten, umbuchen, umschalten, umschreiben, umsteigen, umtauschen, umziehen, umändern, verwandeln, verändern, wandeln, wechseln, ändern", "freq":27459 }, { "id":534210, "l1_text":"verändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"alter, change, clone, diversify, make a career change, make a job move, modify, mutate, transform, vary", "synonyme2":"abändern, auswechseln, erneuern, modifizieren, schalten, umbuchen, umschalten, umschreiben, umsteigen, umtauschen, umziehen, umändern, verwandeln, verändern, wandeln, wechseln, ändern", "freq":14980 }, { "id":455453, "l1_text":"sich ändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"alter, alternate, amend, change, modify, transform, vary", "synonyme2":"abändern, auswechseln, erneuern, modifizieren, schalten, umbuchen, umschalten, umschreiben, umsteigen, umtauschen, umziehen, umändern, verwandeln, verändern, wandeln, wechseln, ändern", "freq":11199 }, { "id":460125, "l1_text":"sich verändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"alter, change, clone, diversify, make a career change, make a job move, modify, mutate, transform, vary", "synonyme2":"abändern, auswechseln, erneuern, modifizieren, schalten, umbuchen, umschalten, umschreiben, umsteigen, umtauschen, umziehen, umändern, verwandeln, verändern, wandeln, wechseln, ändern", "freq":7627 } ] |
With min_freq = 15000:https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB&min_freq=15000
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[ { "id":24728, "l1_text":"ändern", "l2_text":"change", "wortart":"VERB", "synonyme1":"alter, alternate, amend, change, modify, transform, vary", "synonyme2":"abändern, auswechseln, erneuern, modifizieren, schalten, umbuchen, umschalten, umschreiben, umsteigen, umtauschen, umziehen, umändern, verwandeln, verändern, wandeln, wechseln, ändern", "freq":27459 } ] |
Code snippets
Ruby
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require 'curb' require 'json' dictapiurl = "https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB" api = Curl::Easy.new(dictapiurl) api.perform json_data = JSON.parse(api.body_str) |
Python
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import requests import json dictapiurl = 'https://lt-translate-test.herokuapp.com/?langpair=en-de&query=change&wortart=VERB' response = requests.get(dictapiurl) json_data = json.loads(response.text) |
Paid API
Licensing conditions
The API/data package can be used in any number of private and commercial projects of the purchaser:
E. g. in a website application, in a smartphone app etc.
Redistribution is not allowed.
Pricing

Dictionary sources
The dictionary is compiled from the following sources:
- linguatools‘ manually edited dictionary
- IATE: the EU’s terminology database
- EuroVoc: multilingual Thesaurus of the EU
- Wiktionary
- EMWN: Extended Open Multilingual Wordnet
- OmegaWiki
- Frank Richters Glossar
Number of translations in the complete dictionary database and Online Query
lanpair | Online-Query | Number of translations |
---|---|---|
de-en/en-de | German-English Dict | 734.462 |
de-es/es-de | German-Spanish Dict |
97.477 |
de-it/it-de | German-Italian Dict | 64.831 |
de-nl/nl-de | German-Dutch Dict | 63.458 |
de-pl/pl-de | German-Polish Dict | 30.389 |
de-cs/cs-de | German-Czech Dict | 76.916 |
Endpoint and parameters
The parameters are the same as in the test API.
After sign up to RapidAPI you can access the full translate database (free & paid).
Examples of use
linguatools context dictionaries:
German-Englisch, German-Spanish, German-Polish, German-Czech, German-Dutch, German-Italian