That’s were the free translation software Transmiti comes into play. Transmiti basically enables Google Translate on a system wide level in the Windows operating system.

The functionality becomes available right after starting the standalone executable. It is from that moment on possible to translate text anywhere, by selecting the text and pressing the Windows key on the computer keyboard. It works in Office documents, on websites, and every other program or window, as long as the text is selectable.

google translate system wide

Transmiti displays a always-on-top window with the translated text on keypress. It is possible to move the window around or close it. The language that text gets translated to is defined in the program’s options.

As Lee pointed out, the only gripe that users will have with Transmiti is the Windows hotkey, or more precisely the fact that the hotkey cannot be changed.

The Windows hotkey by default opens the start menu, and it is not available on some mobile computer systems. That’s a problem, and it would make sense to add an option to change the hotkey in the options of the program.

Transmiti can be configured to perform an additional action when the hotkey is pressed. It is either possible to copy the selected text to the Windows clipboard, or to replace it with the translated text. Both settings are completely optional.

translation settings

Some users may prefer to copy and paste text that needs to be translated into the form on the Google Translate website, or upload documents that need translations. That’s a possibility. Transmiti on the other hand accelerates the process, as there is no need to open a web browser, open the Google Translate website and submit the text or document.

Especially users who have to translate multiple items per day will find this solution comfortable enough to replace the manual way of translating text.

Transmiti is available for download at the developer website. The program is fully compatible with 32-bit and 64-bit editions of the Windows operating system.

Up until now however there was no way to translate a document into another language and preserving the original document layout at the same time.

Doc Translator is a free online service that can do that for Microsoft Word (doc, docx and xml), Microsoft Excel (xls and xlsx), Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt and pptx) and generic text documents (txt).

The translation service accepts documents of all sizes. The translation itself is initiated on the Doc Translator website.

It begins by clicking on one of the available document format options which opens a file browser. It is possible to load a different support file instead as the format will be automatically recognized by the translation service.

The title and type of the document are displayed on the next page after the document has been loaded by the service. Doc Translator will identify the language of the original document automatically. Both the original language and the target language can be modified if they are not the correct languages.

A click on the translate button will open a save file as dialog window to save the translated document to the local computer system.

Doc Translator offers an interesting translation service thanks to the preserving of the document layout and the unlimited file size of documents that can be translated.

The new option to translate a document becomes available after clicking on Tools > Translate Document in the header menu while viewing a single document in Google Docs.

Available is the usual assortment of languages that is offered by the Google Translate service. Selecting one of the languages in the menu will open a new window that displays the translated text after a short time. It is then possible to create a new document based on the translated document or replace the existing document with the translation.

The document cannot be edited in this window though. This option becomes available after selecting one of the two options described above. It would have been nice if Google Docs offered at least some form of export and editing capabilities right away so that users who want a quick translation of a document can process it further without having to save it first before they can do so.

Another option that is currently missing are partial translations of documents. It’s currently either all or nothing.

source official Google Docs Blog