remark-translate

A simple plugin for remark to translate markdown text to other languages. It uses the translation API of DeepL.

In order to use this plugin, you need to create an API key and register with DeepL.

Note: This is the first version of remark-translate, so please give feedback if you find any bugs.

Installation

npm install remark-translate

Usage

You need to pass an options object to the plugin in order to use it.

These are the options:

• sourceLang: the language of the source markdown text
• destLang: the language of the translated text
• apiKey: the DeepL API token
• yamlTranslate (optional): array with the yaml frontmatter keys to be translated

For security, the API key is not displayed in the source code but used from the environment variable DEEPL_API_KEY.

This is an example for translating markdown text from English to Spanish:

const authKey = process.env.DEEPL_KEY;
const options = { sourceLang: 'en', destLang: 'es', apiKey: authKey, yamlTranslate: ["title", "description"] };

const file = await unified()
    .use(remarkParse)
    .use(remarkStringify)
    .use(remarkFrontmatter, ['yaml'])
    .use(remarkTranslate, options)
    .process(data);

Note that any yaml frontmatter fields as defined in yamlTranslate options are also translated.

This library is ESM only, meaning you cannot import it using require in a Node application. Therefore, you need at a minimum a Node version that supports ESMs.

Testing

You can test the plugin by running the following command:

npm run test

Todos

Currently, the best results are with pure text paragraphs without any additional markdown elements like links or emphasis. These markdown elements influence the whole sentence translation because they are currently translated independently.

I hope to fix this in the future.

Also, I hope to add other translation providers like AWS Translate in the future.

References

• Unified: https://github.com/unifiedjs
• Remark: https://remark.js.org
• DeepL: https://www.deepl.com
• js-yaml: https://github.com/nodeca/js-yaml

License

MIT License