Languages and translation

Most sources about a company or a market are written in its own language. Cormorant searches, fetches and translates across languages so you can reach them without writing the queries yourself, and keeps every original next to its translation.

Language tags#

Every language option takes a BCP 47 tag (en, de-CH, ja, zh-Hans, zh-Hant-TW) or a plain name: english, german, japanese, korean, simplified chinese, traditional chinese, taiwanese, cantonese. Answers always use the canonical tag. Chinese is told apart by script: zh-Hans (Simplified, mainland China) and zh-Hant (Traditional; with -TW or -HK for the regional vocabulary). A plain zh or chinese means Simplified, and a warning says so.

Search in several languages#

languages on POST /v1/search (up to six) searches each language in its own market and merges the results. The query in each language is, in this order: your own (queries), the query itself when it already is in that language (or converted to the other Chinese script), the company's own name in that language when entity names a company, else a machine translation that keeps operators, domains, identifiers and names unchanged. queries_used shows what was searched. See Search in depth.

Fetch a page in a language#

language on POST /v1/fetch asks the site for that language (Accept-Language and, for a tag with a region such as zh-Hant-TW or de-CH, an exit in that country). meta.language_versions lists the page's own versions in other languages, so you can fetch the one you want instead of translating.

Translation#

translate_to adds a machine translation next to the original:

A translation in the background answers status: pending with a translation_id; read it with GET /v1/translations/{id}. Numbers, names and identifiers are checked after translation: a segment that fails its checks is returned untranslated rather than wrong (status: partial). A page already in the target language is not translated and costs nothing.

Translation has two tiers: quality (documents, filings) and fast (titles, snippets, queries). It is billed per 1,000 source characters by tier; text served from the translation cache is billed at the cached rate. When translation cannot run (switched off, capacity reached) the request still answers, with error: translation_unavailable and a reason.

Companies in their own languages#

GET /v1/companies/search?q= finds companies by their names in Chinese (either script, with or without the legal-form ending), Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic: q=騰訊 finds Tencent. translate_to on a company record adds the company's own name in that language (from its names, never a machine translation) and its texts translated.

Research across languages: collect#

POST /v1/collect does all of the above in one job: a search per language for a company or topic, the best pages per language fetched in that language, a page's language versions merged into one document, and the pages translated into translate_to. Read the documents, with coverage per language, from GET /v1/collect/{job_id}. Each search, fetch and translation is billed as when made on its own. See the API contract.