Over the course of this summer one of our interns, Mircea Badoi, worked on a free Oxygen XML add-on designed to help translating XML content.

Starting from yesterday, the add-on is available for Oxygen vesions 21.1 or newer in our default add-on repository. If you want to install it, you can use the Oxygen main menu "Help->Install new add-ons", choose the default Oxygen add-on update site and you will find an add-on named "Translator Helper (Experimental)" in the list.

The add-on has two main features:

You can translate content using Google Translate to various languages:
- Select the content to translate in the Author visual editing mode. You can also select the entire document contents. DITA topics are small so you can select the entire topic contents.
- Right click. Select "Google Translate into" and choose the target language.
- Copy the translated content from the opened web page.
- Click Replace in the Oxygen Translate using Google Translate dialog that showed up. The original content should now be replaced with the translated content, the original element structure and attributes should remain unchanged.
- In addition you can choose to show the original document content in the Translator Helper side view. This will allow you to correct the translation further by looking at the original text and the translated text side by side.
You can see the original content side by side with the content that you are translating, so you can translate correctly and easy by right clicking in the Author visual editing mode and invoking the Show current content in side view action.

So I hope you will enjoy the add-on, if you have questions or improvement requests, they are as usual welcomed. One area in which the plugin may be useful is for example if you want to quickly demo to a customer how a topic written in English would look like in other languages like Japanese Chinese, French, German, Russian, etc.