ZikiTranslator

ZikiTranslator is an on-line machine translation tool. It can translate any text between language pairs.

It supports quite a few languages. It requires an Internet translation to work and it has support for proxy servers built-in. Even though machine translation is improving at an enormous rate, it still isn't a replacement for a human translator. And common errors will result during the use of applications like these. You can expect that. However, ZikiTranslator does a very good job of translating texts, for a machine.

I tested it with the English-Spanish language pair. The first sentence that I tried was a complicated one: "There's much to be seen here", which was translated to pure non-sense. However, I tried to trick the translator with another sentence: "This is what a machine translation will do to your language" to see whether "machine translation" will be translated literally. Well, it wasn't; ZikiTranslator knew the collocation and used it wisely.

An interesting feature that comes built-in with this translation tool is what is called "fast translation". By selecting text in any running application and hitting a designated keyboard shortcut, the application will translate the text to your default language and display it on top of that application. This is useful for when you just need a quick translation to grasp the meaning of a web page, or piece of text.