When you encounter some text or document written in a foreign language that you do not understand, you usually go to Google Translate web site, copy paste the text and see the translation. But this is a very tiring and cumbersome process. What you need is a simple application that can translate the text right within a document viewer like Wordpad, Notepad or Microsoft Word. You can use the free Google Translate Client to automatically translate any language (supported by Google Translate) right inside any application in Windows.
You can download Google Translate Client from http://code.google.com/p/googletranslateclient/. The download is available as a green portable application which does not require any installation. You have to download the application and run it right away in Windows. When it runs, it shows a small icon in the system tray (notification area) in the bottom-right corner of your screen. First thing you have to do is to set the translation preferences. Right-click on this notification area icon and choose Preferences to open the Preferences window.
In the Preferences window, you have to set the options for the target language. When you choose to translate some text using the Google Translate Client, the selected text would be translated into this target language. By default, the target language is set to English but you can set it to anything you like. The second important option you must set, is where you want to send the output (where you want to show the translated text). You can choose to send the translation to the original document which replaces the selected source text with translated text. You can choose to display the translation as tool tip or tray tip. You can also choose to make Windows speak out the translation using the text-to-speech engine. You have to select atleast one of the output options. After selecting the options, you can click on the Close button to save the settings.
Now you are ready to use the Google Translate Client to translate any text in any Windows program. Just select (highlight) the text you want to translate and then press the hotkey for the Google Translate Client which is Ctrl + Q by default. As soon as you press the hotkey, the selected text would be sent to the Google Translate servers for the translation and the returned translated text would be sent to the output of your choice (as selected in the Preferences). In the following picture, I have translated some Russian text into English inside Windows Notepad.
Google Translate Client is an open source application which brings the power of the Google Translate engine to all the applications in Windows. You can now translate any text in Windows without having to copy paste the text on the Google Translate web site and save your precious time. This free tool is available as a portable application and can run on Windows XP and above versions of Windows. This is an indispensable tool for all the Windows users who want to add the quick translation features in any Windows program.