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1

I've downloaded the package but as I'm trying to open it I get this message:

Archive:  /home/agnes/Downloads/ggtranslate.exe
[/home/agnes/Downloads/ggtranslate.exe]
  End-of-central-directory signature not found.  Either this file is not
  a zipfile, or it constitutes one disk of a multi-part archive.  In the
  latter case the central directory and zipfile comment will be found on
  the last disk(s) of this archive.
zipinfo:  cannot find zipfile directory in one of /home/agnes/Downloads/ggtranslate.exe or
          /home/agnes/Downloads/ggtranslate.exe.zip, and cannot find /home/agnes/Downloads/ggtranslate.exe.ZIP, period.
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3  
I can find two apps called Google-Translate-Desktop. One in athtek.com/google-translate-desktop.html, and other in code.google.com/p/google-translate-desktop. They are different, the former looks like a windows only freeware, the second is a multi-platform open source java app. Which one are you talking about? – Javier Rivera Jan 20 '11 at 18:22

3 Answers

up vote 3 down vote

Google Desktop Translator is a Java application that runs on Ubuntu if Java was installed. The file you downloaded obviously is designed to install and uncompress from Windows or (see Javier Rivera's comment) may be another third party Windows program. Both will not work in Ubuntu.

Download the appropriate .zip file directly from Google with this link:

http://code.google.com/p/google-translate-desktop/downloads/list

Uncompress the files, open a terminal, cd to your installation directory and run

java -jar google-translate-desktop-0.52.jar

The program window should now open:

google-translate

Unfortunately in version 0.52 this window has no decoration and cannot be moved, but there is full translation functionality. For quitting or for program settings a status icon is generated in the GNOME panel. Windows decoration is present in the beta version only that has a slightly reduced functionality.

If you're not experienced on your Ubuntu or feel uncomfortable to install anything from external sources you may consider to use Google's Web-frontend for translation instead.

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Just ran run-linux.sh and java -jar google-translate-desktop-0.52.jar and got this msg: Could not open the file /home/agnes/Downloads/go…ranslate-desktop-0.52.jar. gedit has not been able to detect the character coding. Please check that you are not trying to open a binary file. Select a character coding from the menu and try again. – Agnese Jan 20 '11 at 12:16
How do I do it? – Agnese Jan 20 '11 at 13:11
Is java installed on your system? – Takkat Jan 20 '11 at 13:26
yes, I have java – Agnese Jan 20 '11 at 13:59
1  
I was just able to test this on my 10.04 am64 (see screenshots) with no further steps. Java does not find the jar file on your system. Make sure there are no typing errors and the .jar file is really present in the directory from where you run java (e.g. ls lists google-translate-desktop-0.52.jar before you invoke the java command) – Takkat Jan 20 '11 at 17:28
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up vote 0 down vote

you can use Goot(Download). it uses google translator.

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up vote 0 down vote

You tried to run a Windows program. Try this:

  1. Make sure all the files and subdirectories from the ZIP archive are in a folder.
  2. While in that folder, right-click on google-translate-desktop-x.y.jar, and click Properties, then Permissions.
  3. Make sure "Allow executing file as program" is checked.
  4. Close the dialog, right-click on the file, and under Open With, click your Java Runtime.

EDIT: You may have downloaded windows only freeware. Try downloading this, and following the above instructions after extracting the archive.

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