Translation of special characters and HTML markup
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Updated at April 11, 2025
The Translate API returns the response body in JSON format. Therefore, when translating text that contains HTML markup and other special characters, some of these characters may be converted to Unicode. For example, to prevent the double quote (") from marking the end of the text, it is replaced with this six-character sequence: \u0022.
If you send the following request to the model:
{
"targetLanguageCode": "en",
"format": "HTML",
"texts": ["<b>Дорогие коллеги!</b> Поздравляю вас с праздником!"]
}
The response will return with the converted characters:
{
"translations": [
{
"text": "\u003cb\u003eDear colleagues!\u003c/b\u003e I wish you a happy holiday!",
"detectedLanguageCode": "ru"
}
]
}
To get the text with the markup you need, convert the JSON file using a function in the relevant language or any other specialized tool. Here is an example of such a conversion in Python using the requests library:
import requests
IAM_TOKEN = '<IAM_token>'
folder_id = '<folder_ID>'
target_language = 'en'
texts = ["<b>Дорогие коллеги!</b> Поздравляю вас с праздником!"]
body = {
"targetLanguageCode": target_language,
"texts": texts,
"folderId": folder_id,
}
headers = {
"Content-Type": "application/json",
"Authorization": "Bearer {0}".format(IAM_TOKEN)
}
response = requests.post('https://translate.api.cloud.yandex.net/translate/v2/translate',
json = body,
headers = headers
)
body_dict = response.json()
print(body_dict['translations'])
Result:
[{'text': '<b>Dear colleagues!</b> I wish you a happy holiday!', 'detectedLanguageCode': 'ru'}]