google-translate-desktop is a very simple, Java-based Google Translate client.
There’s no mystery about google-translate-desktop – it’s a very, very simple desktop version of the famous Google web app. Add the text you want to translate to the top, pick the appropriate language combination (or leave google-translate-desktop to autodetect it) and press Translate.
As it based on the web app, you have all the same language combinations available – at the moment that clocks in as 50+ languages, from Afrikaans to Yiddish. There’s also a handy button that allows you to reverse your language pair. Apart from pure translation, however, google-translate-desktop doesn’t let you do much more. You can copy your text to and from the clipboard, but that’s pretty much it.
For such a simple app, google-translate-desktop has fairly decent configuration options. If you hit Settings, you’ll be able to give the app a new skin and set options for remembering previously-used languages. There is also an option to use google-translate-desktop through a proxy. In all, google-translate-desktop isn’t up to much, but if for some reason a desktop app is preferable to the online version, it will do the job fine.
Google-translate-desktop is basic in the extreme, but is a faithful replication of the original Google Translate service.
