GoogleTrans API Error - Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

Question

I am having this error when translating thousands of text data in an iteration:

Expecting value: line 1 column 1 (char 0)

My code for translating big amounts of text:

translatedList = []
for index, row in df.iterrows():
    newrow = copy.deepcopy(row)
    try:
        # translate the 'text' column
        translated = translator.translate(row['text'], dest='en')
        newrow['translated'] = translated.text
    except Exception as e:
        print(str(e))
        continue
    translatedList.append(newrow)

I receive this error after translating about 2-3k rows.

Answer 1

I kind of figured out the problem. I think that this is about Google API's request limit.

I solved this by reinitializing the translator API on every iteration:

import copy
from googletrans import Translator

translatedList = []
for index, row in df.iterrows():
    # REINITIALIZE THE API
    translator = Translator()
    newrow = copy.deepcopy(row)
    try:
        # translate the 'text' column
        translated = translator.translate(row['text'], dest='en')
        newrow['translated'] = translated.text
    except Exception as e:
        print(str(e))
        continue
    translatedList.append(newrow)

Answer 2

Google may be blocking your IP, use a VPN and it should work.

Answer 3

In my case, the error was caused by too many requests in a short time period and my IP address was temporarily blocked. I tried it the next day again and everything worked well.

Answer 4

In my case, it's caused by emoji in strings. I removed them and everything works well.

Answer 5

This is what I had to do to bypass their API call restriction... I use a VPN, specifically Nord-Vpn, so to do it the way I did you would need to be able to connect/disconnect from/to a VPN through the terminal...

    def translate_text(text, dest_language="en"):
        # Used to translate using the googletrans library
        import json
        translator = googletrans.Translator()
        try:
            translation = translator.translate(text=text, dest=dest_language)
        except json.decoder.JSONDecodeError:
            # api call restriction
            process = subprocess.Popen(["nordvpn", "d"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
            process.wait()
            process = subprocess.Popen(["nordvpn", "c", "canada"], stdout=subprocess.PIPE)
            process.wait()
            return Process_Data.translate_text(text=text, dest_language=dest_language)
        return translation