TransTools

Editors' ReviewDownload.com staffMay 23, 2016TransTools, or Translator Tools, adds a useful set of free translation-related utilities to Microsoft Word, Excel, and Visio and Autodesk AutoCAD. It speeds up translations, checks to see that translations are complete, localizes numbers, and performs other useful functions from inside these powerful applications.TransTools installed itself in our copy of Word by default, but we could check boxes to install it inside Excel, Visio, and AutoCAD. We clicked Add-Ins on Word's toolbar and selected the TransTools menu. From this menu, we could perform a Language Check, including finding and removing highlighted words. We could also replace multiple items via a pop-up wizard, remove animations, access the Localisation tool to localize numbers, find and remove spaces, find multiple text, and configure the add-in, among other functions. The default languages are Russian and English, though we could change either from extensive drop-down lists. We clicked an entry labeled ToDo, which produced a dialog box that let us add, delete, and modify entries on a to-do list for any document. There's also a full menu of options for the Trados and Wordfast translation services. There's even a menu entry labeled Special that let us insert custom symbols, collect graphics from documents, manage bookmarks, and more.TransTools is easy to use. We simply highlighted an area of text and selected a function from the TransTools menu. We especially liked the Localisation tool, which let us replace all decimal points or thousand marks with locally relevant alternatives using the Search and Replace Dialog or manually. While we didn't have the opportunity to try its CAT-compatible features, we were very impressed by the capabilities TransTools adds to some of the world's busiest programs.