OStatic

Slick Firefox Add-On Does Instant Language Translations of Web Pages

In a two-part series here on OStatic in March, Brian McConnell, who works with language translation sites Worldwide Lexicon and Der Mundo, did a post here, and one here on emerging tools for multilingual web sites and on-the-fly translation of web content from one language to another. As he wrote there: "For many publishers and web app developers, from independent bloggers to high volume sites, designing a site to be multilingual is an afterthought, often thought to be extremely difficult. That's unfortunate because the world is a big place, and there's a lot of interesting content out there waiting to be read, if people can find it and understand it."

Sure enough, tools for instant translation of web content from one language to another are works in progress, but they are getting better. Now, Brian has sent me over a quick-to-install Firefox extension that lets me jump to web pages in other languages, and, with a couple of clicks, get good translations of the entire pages. I have to say this is pretty slick. Here's how you can try it.

The Worldwide Lexicon Universal Translator for Firefox extension is brand new, and Brian classifies it as an early preview, with not all features added. Still, it worked well and was stable for me.

To install it on a version of Firefox on Windows, I right-clicked my mouse on this link. Then, from the context menu, I chose Save Link As, and was prompted in a dialog box to save the file as wwwlbar.xpi, which I put in a personal directory. Then I went to Firefox's File menu, selected File Open, and opened the file, which installed the extension, and prompted me to restart Firefox.

Once I had the extension installed, I had this toolbar in Firefox:

 

As you can see, the toolbar has a checkbox on the left where I can tell it to perform a translation of a web page, and I have it set in the screenshot above to treat the source language as Spanish, and the target language (my desired translation) in English. In the drop-down boxes, I can also select French, Russian and several other languages.

I then went to the Yahoo! Espanol home page, which looks like this:

 

 Then, I checked the Translate button in the extension's toolbar, refreshed the page, and instantly got a translation of Yahoo! Espanol's home page, without having to leave Firefox, as seen below.

  

 Now, I mentioned atop this post, that translation tools for entire web pages are not perfect, and this Worldwide Lexicon extension is not completely perfect either, but I tried it on a number of web pages, and I can certainly understand the translations. In the screen just above, there are a couple of strange syntactical constructions, such as "they show that breaks down at sea," and "come to the creativity to name their children," but the menu on the left translates perfectly, and I can tell what the news stories are about with ease.

This extension is an early preview, but it's really quite good, and you can definitely have fun with it. By the way, as a tech blogger, I'd love to see Japanese and Chinese added to the list of available languages, but I also understand that they are among the toughest languages to translate. Brian McConnell says that the finished version will support 50 languages, and will automatically detect the language on the page that you're looking at.

• firefox
• translation
• Der Mundo
• Worldwide Lexicon
• Universal Translator

by Brian McConnell on Aug. 21, 2009

Here's a quick explanation of how the tool works. When you open a page, it detects the page language using a variety of methods, and if it thinks translation is needed (e.g. the page is French, your computer is configured for English), it starts translating and redrawing the page. The idea is that you don't need to do anything, just open a URL and it does the rest.

The system uses a best effort method to combine professional translations (if available) with volunteer or user generated translations, and then machine translations. The goal is to get the best possible translations using available sources, and to enable users to create, edit and score translations in a process similar to Wikipedia. Machine translations are shown against a light blue background, human translations against a light yellow or green background, so you can see at a glance what has been translated.

It currently supports about 40 languages. If you open a Swedish page, for example, it will detect this and start rendering the page in your language. We will expand the list of manually selectable languages in the next day or so.

You can also select a bilingual view where the tool displays both the original and translated texts side by side. This is useful if you are teaching yourself a language, or if you are actively translating pages. To edit a translation, just hover over a text and a popup editor and scoring tool will appear.

The tool will be released via addons.mozilla.org fairly soon, but you can find the current experimental version on our site for now. Enjoy.

-Brian McC

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