I built this plugin to easily find out how buttons, error messages and instructional text will display in different languages without leaving Fireworks. This is important for any application that is supported in many languages, such as the Rackspace Web Apps platform. For example, a "Submit" button that is hard-coded at 80px wide will break when translated into Spanish because the word itself will be over 80px wide.

This plugin will automatically translate the current selection (or selections) via the Google Translate API. It is important to note that these results are not "translation" but "transliteration", which won't represent the original word exactly. I believe that the results, while far from perfect, are close enough to give a good approximation of the localized design.

This plugin is built off of the wonderful FWXHR library by John Dunning, which allows Fireworks Javascript commands to make XMLHttpRequest calls. This ingenious library uses a Flash movie to funnel requests to the internet at large, functionality that is blocked in the native JavaScript (presumably for security reasons). The request hits a PHP file located on my (or your) server that connects to the Google Translate API through Jose da Silva's PHP library.

Error handling is done minimally by myself and pretty extensively by John's XHR library. The current version won't handle selections of non-text objects. This is mosly do to the lack of API documentation on Adobe's part.

Pleaes let me know how you are using this plugin and any comments or feature requests you may have. Since it's Javascript you should be able to modify it at will. If you come up with anything cool, please share!