What is the advantage of using the below input format in Google Translate API

Question

The Google Translate API right now takes multiple inputs to be translated as below:

--data "{'q': 'Hello world','q': 'My name is Jeff','target': 'de'}"

Instead of using multiple entries like above for 'q' they could have use array like below:

 --data "{'q':['Hello world','My name is Jeff'],'target': 'de'}"

What is the advantage of the 1st format?

Answer 1

I have tested both versions and I got the same result, with the messages translated in German.

Try this code:

curl -s -X POST -H "Content-Type: application/json" \   
    -H "Authorization: Bearer "$(gcloud auth print-access-token) \ 
    --data "{'q':['Hello world','My name is Jeff'],'target': 'de'}" \
"https://translation.googleapis.com/language/translate/v2"

You will get this response:

{
  "data": {
    "translations": [
      {
        "translatedText": "Hallo Welt",
        "detectedSourceLanguage": "en"
      },
      {
        "translatedText": "Mein Name ist Jeff",
        "detectedSourceLanguage": "en"
      }
    ]
  }
}

You may need authentication credentials for this to work, follow the steps here to add those credentials and then test the code above.