Telegram iOS Translate Feature — How the hell did they do it?
Telegram for iOS has just added a new feature to translate a message. When I tried that feature out, I was pretty stunned. How the hell did they do it? I’ve done a pretty extensive research and Apple simply don’t provide any public API to do this as of iOS 15. Did I miss something?
Check out their blog post to see how it looks https://telegram.org/blog/reactions-spoilers-translations
Well, Telegram is open source so I decided to take a look at the code, and voila!
Telegram-iOS/Translate.swift at master · TelegramMessenger/Telegram-iOS
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github.com
let textView = UITextView()textView.text = texttextView.isEditable = falseif let navigationController = context.sharedContext.mainWindow?.viewController as? NavigationController, let topController = navigationController.topViewController as? ViewController { topController.view.addSubview(textView) textView.selectAll(nil) textView.perform(NSSelectorFromString(["_", "trans", "late:"].joined(separator: "")), with: nil) DispatchQueue.main.async { textView.removeFromSuperview() }}
What they do is
- Add a new
UITextViewto the top most view controller - Populate it with the text you want translated and manually select it
- Call private API
_translate: - Remove the text view
Looking a bit deeper, they’d have some issues with crashes when the text contains emojis, so they’re filtering them out.
Anyway, this is a pretty genius way to simply add translations to your app. The only thing to consider is that you’re using private API that may stop working at any point so you should check for respondsToSelector to prevent crashes and bear in mind the it may stop working at any time and your users are not going to be happy if this feature suddenly disappears from the app.
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