Indian Dictionary

Can you name the largest English-speaking nation? It's not the USA; it's India. Hindi is India's official language, but English is its secondary official language, reflecting its importance as a common language of business and contact in an emerging tech powerhouse with more than a billion citizens who speak dozens of languages and dialects. Indian Dictionary for Chrome from TechRaga is a free Google Chrome plug-in that adds support for India's major languages: Hindi, Gujarati, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Tamil, Telgu, and English.

As with most Chrome add-ins, Indian Dictionary is extremely small, only 26.31KB--smaller than some programs' logos and not a whole lot bigger than a shortcut. It opened with its Options tab, which let us select check boxes for the languages we wanted to add. We clicked Save and reopened Chrome. Using the add-in is extremely easy: highlight and right-click a block of text, select Indian Dictionary, and then select the language from the drop-down list. A pop-up will appear bearing a translation, if one is available, though that was not always the case. However, each of the languages we selected had been incorporated in Chrome's extensive drop-down list of languages, as expected. We installed Indian Dictionary in Chrome and ChromePlus, too; it worked in both.

India's phenomenal growth emphasizes technology, and the need for tools like Indian Dictionary will grow just as quickly, and not just among the many millions of PC users in India. Anyone who does any business with India (and who doesn't, these days?) will find a need for this handy plug-in, sooner or later. It certainly bolsters Chrome's credentials as a world-class browser.