When designing interfaces that will be localized, it's sometimes useful to do a quick translation to see how long the UI strings will be in other languages, so that you can ensure they'll fit within the layout. Although, it's nowhere near as good as a human translator, the Translate Text extension lets you quickly preview strings in another language using Google's language REST API.

To use it, select one or more text elements and then run Commands > Text > Translate Text. In the resulting dialog, choose the text's current language and the language into which you want to translate it. (Your choices will be remembered the next time you run the command.) Then click OK. The command will send the text of each selected element to the Google API for translation, and then replace the existing text with the translation (so you may want to make a copy first).

Note that the formatting of each text element will be based on the style of its first character, so any additional styles will be lost. For instance, if you have some italicized words in the middle of a 12pt. Arial text block, the italics will be lost when you run the command, and everything will appear in 12pt. Arial normal.

The Translate Text command was inspired by Rob Szumski's FW Translate extension, and uses the FWXHR library to make HTTP requests to the Google translation API.

Release history

0.2.1

Added support for Catalan and Tagalog. Fixed bug where the "Unknown" selection in the From menu wasn't remembered.

0.2.0

Fixed bug on Mac which would cause the translation dialog to throw an error. Fixed bug where HTML entity codes for apostrophes were not replaced in the translated text. Updated dialog color.

0.1.0

Initial release.