Translation Plugin

To tell you frankly, this is dumb plugin which doesnt have any intelligence and purely dependent upon third party services to complete its job. I developed this plugin jus for project need and freeing some developer’s brain cells from remembering translation site name. Translation plugin acts as an agent between online translation service such as Google and Babelfish.

Translation View

Features

1. With this plugin you can translate text, property file.
2. You can select source & destination language for your text.

Limitations

It currently doesnot support UTF-16 languages due to limitations in displaying those languages.
This plugin works only with Eclipse 3.5 (Galileo)

Download

You can download this plugin here. Just copy the jar file in plugins folder. To locate this plugin go to Window ->Show View -> Other ->Translation -> Text Translator.

So what other alternate plugins are available in market and why should I use this plugin

This is not the first plugin for Eclipse which translates text from one language to another. There are various plugins which can do this job like

1. code.google.com has one plugin which gets integrated with Eclipse and provides various options to translate text. (http://code.google.com/p/google-translate-eclipse-plugin/). But this plugin is tied up with Google translation service and hence you cannot compare translation results.
2. There is one more available from eobjectsoft (http://eobjectsoft.com/product/productTranslate.htm). Again this plugin is tied up with Google translation service.

One common problem I found with these plugins is that, if you have to choose source language for your translation, there is no direct option available. You have to go to prefrences window and locate plugin section and change it. This sounds lil irritating, what if you have to frequently change source language, would you like to go through the pain of open, locate, update and press ok lifecycle and that to just specify one preference.

Areas of Improvement

1. Yes this plugin is not complete, it doesnt support integration with context menu of Eclipse (one of the feature of above listed plugin.).
2. This plugin itself is not internationalized and current version is available only in English language.

These features will be added soon.

Precautions

Dont completely depend upon the translation service as the results of translation may not be accurate and require professionals to verifty the trasnlated text.
Also there is no out of box APIs provided by Babelfish for translation. This plugin uses screen scraping technique to parse the results produced by Babelfish and hence it takes more time than its competitor to produce results. Results produced by Google translation service converts string that contains characters like {0} to (0). So be careful and review your translated text after plugin completes its job. If you have any suggestions, please use below form to send your suggestions.

Till then, happy translating.