Google Translate in Sidepanel

When browsing the Internet in research sessions, you might stumble upon articles or pages that are not in your preferred language. While translating them yourself might be a good option, it is also tedious and, if the text is rather large, using Google Translate might not sound like such a bad idea.

Google Translate in Sidepanel allows you to use the Google Translate service directly from Chrome’s side panel, which really comes in handy if you need to browse while also translating text.

Once the extension is installed, you can toggle the side panel to see the Google Translate window. There is nothing different from the Google Translate interface when opening it in a separate tab and working with it is the same.

However, there is a new feature that you might just find quite handy: when selecting a piece of text on the page you visit, a small icon is displayed. Clicking on it opens a popup window where the selected text is automatically sent as input to Google Translate. The translation is also displayed, evidently, allowing you to quickly copy the resulting text and use it wherever needed.

Aside from Google Translate, this extension also adds a tab for ChatGPT in the side panel. To use it and start new dialogs with the AI, you first need to login with a Google account in the “User Center”.

There is no doubt that having ChatGPT at your disposal in the side panel is surely tempting, especially when you are researching or working on a project.

On the downside, there is a flaw: the current conversation with ChatGPT or the last Google Translate input are automatically cleared once you navigate from one section to another. I found this to be quite frustrating, especially since I did not get to save the translation result or the ChatGPT conversations.

The idea behind Google Translate in Sidepanel is good and can surely bring benefits to productivity, since both Google Translate and ChatGPT are highly used. However,  being able to save the prompts and the translation results is more than necessary.