translation-rs

Safe Rust bindings for Apple's Translation.framework on macOS, plus typed language helpers for canonical language identifiers, language pairs, translation configuration state, translation responses, translation errors, and NaturalLanguage-backed language recognition.

Status: v0.3.0 covers all public Translation.framework symbols in the current macOS SDK and adds a Tier-1 async_api module for Future-based translation and availability workflows.

Quick start

use translation::prelude::*;

fn main() -> Result<(), Box<dyn std::error::Error>> {
    let source = Language::new("en").canonicalized()?;
    let target = Language::new("es").canonicalized()?;
    let pair = LanguagePair::between(source.clone(), target.clone()).canonicalized()?;

    let availability = LanguageAvailability::new()?;
    println!(
        "{pair:?} status: {:?}",
        availability.status_for_language_pair(&pair)?
    );

    let mut configuration = TranslationConfiguration::new()
        .with_source(source)
        .with_target(target);
    configuration.invalidate();

    let session = TranslationSession::from_translation_configuration(&configuration)?;
    match session.translate("hello world") {
        Ok(response) => println!("{}", response.target_text()),
        Err(error) => println!("translation unavailable: {error}"),
    }

    println!("recognized: {:?}", recognize_language("hello world")?);
    Ok(())
}

Highlights

Language and LanguagePair wrappers that canonicalize Locale.Language identifiers through the Swift bridge.
LanguageAvailability access to supportedLanguages, pair status, and text status, including optional target-language queries.
TranslationConfiguration for mutable source/target configuration state and invalidation version tracking.
TranslationSession with can_request_downloads, is_ready, cancel, eager batch translation, and streaming translate(batch:) iteration.
TranslationRequest setters plus TranslationResponse constructors, serde support, and typed language accessors.
TranslationError variants that preserve both errorDescription and failureReason from Translation.framework errors.
recognize_language / detect_language fallback powered by NLLanguageRecognizer.

Availability

The crate weak-links Translation.framework, so the typed Language, LanguagePair, TranslationConfiguration, TranslationResponse, and LanguageRecognition helpers work on macOS 14+.
LanguageAvailability requires macOS 15+.
Manual TranslationSession construction is currently available on macOS 26+ through TranslationSession(installedSource:target:); the crate surfaces those APIs and returns structured TranslationError values on older systems.

Async API

Enable the async feature to use executor-agnostic futures backed by Swift Task thunks and doom-fish-utils completion helpers:

translation-rs = { version = "0.3", features = ["async"] }

The async surface currently includes:

AsyncTranslationSession::translate
AsyncTranslationSession::translations
AsyncTranslationSession::prepare_translation
AsyncLanguageAvailability::status
AsyncLanguageAvailability::supported_languages

See examples/10_async_translate.rs and examples/11_async_availability.rs for end-to-end usage with pollster::block_on.

Examples

The crate ships numbered examples for every logical area plus an end-to-end framework smoke test:

01_language_roundtrip
02_language_pair_roundtrip
03_translation_error_messages
04_language_availability_smoke
05_translation_configuration_lifecycle
06_translation_response_roundtrip
07_language_recognition_smoke
08_translation_session_smoke
09_framework_smoke
10_async_translate (requires --features async)
11_async_availability (requires --features async)

Run the sync examples with:

for ex in 01_language_roundtrip 02_language_pair_roundtrip 03_translation_error_messages 04_language_availability_smoke 05_translation_configuration_lifecycle 06_translation_response_roundtrip 07_language_recognition_smoke 08_translation_session_smoke 09_framework_smoke; do
  cargo run --example "$ex"
done

Run the async examples with:

cargo run --features async --example 10_async_translate
cargo run --features async --example 11_async_availability

Coverage

See COVERAGE.md for the API-by-API audit against the active macOS SDK.

License

Licensed under either Apache-2.0 or MIT at your option.

translation-rs 0.4.1