Auto translation with GOOGLETRANSLATE is not working [duplicate]

Question

The issue is simple, when I try to do auto translate from English to a detected language I got an error, the formula is:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; "auto")

and the error is something like

Error, Google Translate does not support translation from en to pl-PL.

The problem (I think) is that GOOGLETRANSLATE is supposed to get language as two letter code when default value is language + country code (which is not supported https://support.google.com/docs/answer/3093331?hl=en)

Is it possible to fix that? I would like to translate to user's language (so I want to use "auto" value), no matter what is the language and I assume that if the problem occurs for one language it will happen for different one.

Answer 1

Have you tried to use ; instead of ,.

Example:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE(A1 ; "auto"; "bg")

Answer 2

I have the same issue for Russian. The formula =GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; "auto") gives the error:

Google Translate does not support translating from en to ru-RU.

This is Google issue, the best way is to report it:

• Menu: Help > Report a problem

Here's a workaround:

• make a script to detect sheet's locale.
• use regex to extract first part of a locale string.

Here's the sample code:

function getLocale()
{
  var locale = SpreadsheetApp.getActive().getSpreadsheetLocale(); // pl_PL    
  return /(.*)_/.exec(locale)[1]; // pl
}

The usage:

=GOOGLETRANSLATE("Cat"; "en"; getLocale())