phrasebook-fr-to-en

phrasebook-fr-to-en is a CLI that uses the OpenAI API to enrich French to English phrasebooks with AI generated translations, audios, and images.

Installing and running

It's a Python program. You can install it as an uv tool like this:

uv tool install phrasebook-fr-to-en

After you generate an OpenAI API key, and with your original French to English translations in the file my-phrasebook.tsv, you can generate new ones, along with audios and images, by running this:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-api-key>
phrasebook-fr-to-en my-phrasebook.tsv

This creates the file enriched_phrasebook.tsv with all translations. It also saves the audios and images in the directory media. Both enriched_phrasebook.tsv and media sit next to your phrasebook file.

Your original phrasebook is left unchanged.

Run the following to list the options and their documentation:

phrasebook-fr-to-en --help

OpenAI API [IMPORTANT]

This program uses the OpenAI API with the following models:

• https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-5.2
• https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-4o-mini-tts
• https://platform.openai.com/docs/models/gpt-image-1.5

To use it, you need to register with OpenAI. You also need to be verified as an organization (required for the image model). Then create an API key: https://platform.openai.com.

Once you've done this, set OPENAI_API_KEY as an environment variable before you run the program, like this:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-api-key>

Format of your original phrasebook

Your original phrasebook must be a TSV file (TAB separation) with the columns date, french, and english, like in this example:

date	french	english
2025-11-15	Montez les escaliers.	Climb the stairs.
2025-11-16	Il est beau.	He is handsome.
2025-01-17	Il est moche.	He is ugly.

Full example

phrasebook-fr-to-en takes a TSV (TAB separation) file as input. Each row is a French to English translation. It uses the following columns: date, french, english.

For each translation (each row), two new related translations are generated. The goal is to show:

• An English grammar point, or
• Useful nouns, verbs, or
• Alternative phrasing (formality, slang, etc.).

These new translations, along with the original, are saved in the file enriched_phrasebook.tsv. It sits next to your phrasebook file. Records in your original phrasebook whose english field matches a record in the enriched phrasebook are skipped.

Your original phrasebook is left unchanged.

For all translations (original and AI generated), an English audio and an image are generated. They are saved in a media directory next to the original phrasebook file.

For instance, if my-phrasebook.tsv contains the following record (columns separated by tabs)

date	french	english
2025-11-15	Montez les escaliers.	Climb the stairs.

and you run the following commands:

export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your-api-key>
phrasebook-fr-to-en my-phrasebook.tsv

This produces the file enriched_phrasebook.tsv with AI generated translations. It has the following columns: french, english, anki_audio, anki_img, generated_from, id, audio_filename, img_filename, date.

french	english	anki_audio	anki_img	generated_from	id	audio_filename	img_filename	date
Montez les escaliers.	Climb the stairs.	[sound:phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.mp3]	"<img src=""phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.png"">"		1	phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.mp3	phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.png	2025-11-15
Montez les escaliers jusqu’au premier étage.	Climb the stairs up to the first floor.	[sound:phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.mp3]	"<img src=""phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.png"">"	1	2	phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.mp3	phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.png	2025-11-15
Prenez les escaliers, c’est juste à gauche.	Take the stairs; it’s just on the left.	[sound:phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.mp3]	"<img src=""phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.png"">"	1	3	phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.mp3	phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.png	2025-11-15

This also generates 3 audios and 3 images.

Your directory then looks like this:

.
├── enriched_phrasebook.tsv
├── my-phrasebook.tsv
└── media
    ├── phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.mp3
    ├── phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.png
    ├── phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.mp3
    ├── phrasebook-fr-to-en-2.png
    ├── phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.mp3
    └── phrasebook-fr-to-en-3.png

For Anki users

In the previous example, did you notice the columns anki_audio and anki_img? They contain formatted fields for audio and image that you can use directly in your Anki decks:

[sound:phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.mp3]
<img src="phrasebook-fr-to-en-1.png">

This way you can import enhanced_phrasebook.tsv directly into Anki. No changes are needed to get audio played and images displayed.

Note that this only works:

1. If you enable "Allow HTML" option when importing the enriched file,
2. If you copy the audios and images from the media directory to your Anki collection.media directory.

See Anki docs:

• https://docs.ankiweb.net/importing/text-files.html#importing-media
• https://docs.ankiweb.net/files.html

Dev

Installing and running from source

To run phrasebook-fr-to-en from the source, run this:

uv run src/phrasebook_fr_to_en/cli.py phrasebook.tsv

Alternatively, phrasebook-fr-to-en can be installed as an uv tool from the source like this:

uv tool install .

Then run it like this:

phrasebook-fr-to-en my-phrasebook.tsv

Running the tests

Run the tests like this:

uv run pytest

To run the tests with real calls to the OpenAI API, run this:

OPENAI_LIVE=1 uv run pytest

For this to work, the OPENAI_API_KEY environment variable must be set using an OpenAI API key. This variable can also be declared in a .env file.

Test coverage

This software has 100% test coverage.

To check this, you can run the following commands:

OPENAI_LIVE=1 uv run coverage run -m pytest
uv run coverage report

As mentioned above, OPENAI_API_KEY must be set prior to running the tests with coverage.

Linter + formating

ty and ruff must be installed first:

ty check
ruff format