Review: Translate It! for Mac
- Article 18 of 19
- MacUser, December 2010
“Have you been looking for a Mac OS X dictionary, that can translate any word from any language, for a long time? Congratulations! You have just found it!” As promises go, that’s quite a big one, and that’s the claim made for Translate It! for Mac.
On the face of it, Translate It! has a lot going for it. With Translate It! running, you can hover your mouse over any word in any application written in Cocoa and get a translation of it. A contextual menu is also available in select applications, there’s a Dashboard widget and you can also type words or drag and drop them into the application itself. It’s expandable, with support for other dictionaries created in XDXF, Babylon, SDICT, Apple Dictionary, DSL and DCT formats. There’s also a dictionary builder for creating your own dictionaries and the program can take advantage of online services to offer more extensive translations of complete text. If you’re intent not just on translation but learning, Translate It! keeps a record of your translations and can help you create and print flashcards based on that history, as well as quiz you on it.
All good in theory, but the practice is somewhat different. For starters, although “mouse hover” translation is easy enough, the program itself is quite hard to use and configure. It actually comes with very few dictionaries: simple Russian, Spanish and French. These are usable, but not very reliable, the French dictionary rightly translating “regardez” as “concern” but failing to point out the more obvious – and contextually correct – translation of “look”. Indeed, “mouse hovering” translation is a very hit and miss affair, capable of only analysing individual words rather than phrases (although in-app translation using online services is much better). Often Translate It!’s best guess at which language a word is written in will be wrong. It will even fail to guess what language you want something translated into, sometimes translating from French into Russian, for example, and will often translate a nearby word rather than the word your cursor is hovering over. The fact you can hardly leave your mouse on-screen for more than a few seconds without Translate It! trying to translate something means you’ll soon turn off “mouse hover” translation.
Getting access to other languages isn’t easy either. Translate It! merely takes you to the company’s web site, where there are links to a few new ones provided by “our friend Remi” and five online sources of dictionaries. While you can find some decent dictionaries for common languages, after a bit of work, rarer languages such as Greek are hard to find and as patchy as the built-in dictionaries. Frequently they will be right, but like the built-in dictionary not recognise synonyms, context or different parts of speech (translating ‘there’ as in ‘over there’ rather than ‘there is’, in the Greek case, for example) and not give the user alternative translations; sometimes they’ll be wrong altogether.
At best, Translate It! is a quick way to get access to possible meanings of certain foreign words. However, it is far more expensive, more annoying and less accurate than having a bookmark in your web browser for Babelfish or some other free online service.