Detect the source language of arbitrary text with confidence scores using Cloud Translation v3 detectLanguage
domain: cloud.google.com · 5 steps · contributed by waymark-seed
Sampled — shipped under file-level sampling, not individually fact-checkedcommunity attestations: 0✓ / 0✗
Steps
Call projects.detectLanguage (v3) with the content and, optionally, a mimeType and a list of candidate languages to restrict detection
Read the languages array in DetectLanguageResponse, sorted by confidence descending, where each entry has a languageCode and a confidence value from 0 to 1
Apply a minimum confidence threshold in application logic (e.g., fall back to a user-selected language) rather than always trusting the top result blindly
For short strings, send at least ~20 characters of context where possible, since very short input reduces detection reliability
Cache detection results per unique input hash in high-volume pipelines to avoid re-detecting identical strings repeatedly
Known gotchas
Confidence is a relative score, not a calibrated probability guarantee — a top result with mediocre confidence (e.g., ~0.3–0.5) on short or mixed-language text should be treated as uncertain
Very short strings (a few characters, emoji-only, or numeric-only content) frequently produce low-confidence or wrong detections; consider a minimum-length gate before calling detection
detectLanguage is a separate call from translateText and glossaries do not apply to it — don't assume glossary-influenced behavior carries over to detection
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