Investigate new deepl api calls - Network error

[cswank73]

downloaded openL from fdroid and it will not work. Get "network error - retry" every time. only two versions on fdroid, 2.1.0 and 2.0.1 I have tried both and have the same problem.

[AyN1]

Yes need to fix it

[AyN1]

I'd like to use it even if I have to pay

[LenzGr]

FWIW, I am facing the same issue. This basically renders the app unusable for me. Which is a shame, it looked promising!

[Maxxee]

After all the months, I don't think there will happen anything. Please, anthony-reboul, just let it be and don't put any more high hopes in people. What I don't understand is, why still accessing DeepL via its API, that's a very silly idea, as ANY direct API client will be blocked sooner or later. Why not simply change it to a web client with the feature to share text to it? All other DeepL apps for Android are web clients and they will never be blocked, but unfortunately we cannot share text to any of them.

[KingDuckZ]

I'm a new user but this app never worked for me. I don't know if this is the problem or not but I think it should be removed from f-droid if it's known to be unusable now.

[Yky]

@anthony-reboul Are you still maintaining this app and working on this issue?

The F-Droid team is considering removing OpenL from the repository, if there is no fix scheduled for this issue. See F-Droid issue https://gitlab.com/fdroid/fdroiddata/issues/1720

[anthony-hermet]

@Yky I need to investigate the changed on the API side. I'll work on it next week, but cannot commit on a date dor this fix without knowing the complexity if the new API calls.

[anthony-hermet]

I'm unfortunately a bit out of free time since few months. I cannot give you any fix date for the moment.

[fadelkon]

It looks like the API access is clearly a paid product. The API itself is documented publicly. And the product is available for subscription

I was trying to find if they offer some limited amount of API calls for free, like I just want to translate a sentence a day, or a bunch of words. However it doesn't look like it.

Regarding URL access, at openL @anthony-reboul uses https://www2.deepl.com/jsonrpc. However, the API they offer is REST and they say:

API versions

Please note that: Version 1 (v1) of the DeepL API is not supported by the DeepL API plan available from October 2018. Please use version 2 for all new products other than CAT tool integrations. Version 2 (v2) of the DeepL API is not compatible with CAT tools and is not included in DeepL plans for CAT tool users. If you intend to integrate DeepL Pro into a CAT tool or another tool assisting translation, please contact support@DeepL.com

Currently, the two DeepL API versions differ only in the URL used for access.

https://www.deepl.com/docs-api.html?part=accessing

I don't know if I understand what they say. Anyway, for me it looks like the v1 API was jsonrpc and that they mantain it for some reason, and that there may be some room for a limited, free usage; and the newer v2 API is REST and you must always authenticate.

I don't know, I think the best way to go would be to talk to them. At the end this is an open source app, and if you find some trick to snitch in, and they don't want us to use it for free, they will know how to close the hole :man_shrugging:

[KingDuckZ]

Just a thought, but can you send a POST request to their regular home page and scrape the translation from the returned html? I have a small scraping tool written in c++ somewhere, it should be easy to put that into your code and retrieve just the translated string. If you think it's a good idea I can post the link to my repo.

[kojid0]

Just a thought, but can you send a POST request to their regular home page and scrape the translation from the returned html? I have a small scraping tool written in c++ somewhere, it should be easy to put that into your code and retrieve just the translated string. If you think it's a good idea I can post the link to my repo.

That sounds like a workaround 👍🏼. Let's wait what @anthony-reboul thinks about it.