Note to Firefox users: Maryamsoft's Firefox add-on is better than gTranslate

Tuesday, November 24, 2009

I'm sure there may be other better add-ons than gTranslate out there, but just as a FYI for Firefox users, Maryamsoft's translator is better than gTranslate. It was originally created as a Persian-English-Persian dictionary and was a bit sketchy at times, but a few months ago it switched to Google Translate and thus now is capable of translating blocks of text at a time. Here's what makes it better than gTranslate:

- gTranslate requires the user to select which language pair to use, and this becomes the standard until the languages are changed again. If you want to translate from German to English then you will have to select the text, click the right mouse button, find German, move over, and then select English. Only after that will it translate German to English for you with one click of the button. If you find another language to translate then you'll have to repeat the process over again. Maryamsoft's add-on just acts like Google Translate though, identifying the language selected and translating from that.

- Maryamsoft translates every language that Google Translate provides. gTranslate for some reason only has about 20 or so to choose from, so Turkish and Maltese and all the rest are not available.

- Maryamsoft always stays on top, so you can switch tabs while still seeing the translated content. This is invaluable if you have to type something out and don't want to have to resize the window in order to see it as you do so.

The down side to Maryamsoft of course is that the interface is in Persian. Most of the time you will just have to select the text, hit the right mouse button and it'll translate to English for you (or Persian if you select something in English to translate the other way), but if it fails to identify the language or you want to select another one then you'll have to identify it from the list. A basic knowledge of the Perso-Arabic script is enough to identify languages though, so if you can fumble along with the script then it should be worth adding on to Firefox even if you don't know Persian.



As mentioned above, I'm sure there are better translation add-ons out there so let me know if you use something other than gTranslate and why it works better.

5 comments:

Matt said...

So, I downloaded it, but how do I get it to work?

I don't read Persian, so I don't know what exactly to do, or if I'm supposed to change any options via the interface.

Matt said...

Hm, well, thanks to Google Translate, I got it to work such that I'm able to translate from Chinese into English (my main purpose for using it), though I'm still curious about how to use the last three tabs of the options menu so as to improve the usability. I know the third-to-last deals with how to bring up the translator window, though I don't know which option would be best (or what each option means, other then involving either the Ctrl, Shift, or Alt key).

Anonymous said...

Never mind. gTranslate would probably be better for my purposes, anyway.

Matt said...

Never mind. gTranslate would probably be better for my purposes anyway.

Anonymous said...

Never mind. gTranslate would probably be better for my purposes, anyway.

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