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Lingro: Look up definitions, translations on any page

Lingro
Ever find yourself puzzling over an unfamiliar word on a web page? Sure, you could open a new browser tab and look it up at Dictionary.com. Or you could just drag a Lingro bookmarklet to your browser toolbar and hit it to make every word on a web page clickable. When you select a word a definition will pop up, assuming you've set the tool to translate from English to English. You can also click on the flag iconts to translate words into Spanish, French, German, Italian, Polish, or Swedish.

The definitions are culled from publicly available dictionaries and user contributions filed under a Creative Commons license. So if you find a word without a definition, a message will pop up asking if you'd like to contribute one. Of course, the odds of your clicking the word if you already knew the meaning are pretty slim (unless you're say, writing a review of Lingro).

You can also use Lingro the old fashioned way, by visiting the service's home page and typing in a word or entering a web address to translate. There's even a service that lets you upload a file from your desktop for translation into another language.

Honestly, we didn't have much luck translating entire web sites. But Lingro's dictionary definitions and single word translations seem pretty good.

[via ReadWriteWeb]

Reverso: Why just translate when you can also conjugate?

Reverso
There are plenty of web services that will let you translate chunks of text from one language to another. And Reverso is certainly one of them. But Reverso has a few tricks up its sleeve that you won't find in Google Translate, Windows Live Translator, or Babel Fish.

Near the top of the Reverso web page are four tabs: Translation, Dictionary, Conjugator, and More. The translation tool does a decent job of translating text to and from several languages: English, French, German, Italian, Russian, and Spanish. But if you click on the Dictionary tab, you can enter a word, choose a dictionary, and get a more precise definition. And if you click on the conjugate tab, you can practice conjugating your verbs in the language of your choice.

Unlike many other popular web translation services, Reverso does not offer a way to translate entire web pages online. But Windows users can purchase Reverso's desktop application that offers this feature. Or you could, you know, use another service if and when you want to translate complete pages.

[via A Little Bit of Everything]

Add a translation widget to your web page

Translate widgetsThe beauty of the web is that your personal homepage could have an international audience. Of course, visitors from Russia, Korea, or Japan might have a hard time reading your English-only website.

There are plenty of tools out there that let proactive internet users translate a web page. But you can also make it easy on visitors by adding translation widgets to your blog or web site.

This week Microsoft released a widget for Windows Live Translator. And it's pretty slick. All you have to do is copy a tiny bit of code to your web page, and a drop down box will show up on your site letting visitors know that they can "translate this site" in a variety of languages including German, Spanish, Portuguese, and Chinese.

If you're more of a Google person, we also dug up a widget that uses Google Translate, but it's a bit less elegant. This widget will simply add a series of links to your page that let visitors know they can translate the site into Arabic, German, Portuguese, Chinese, and so on.

What tricks do you have for making your web site internationally friendly?

Update: Google has launched an official translation widget for your web page as well. Their widget doesn't blend into all web sites very well just yet (it assumes you have a white background), but does offer a faster translation.

[via Bink.nu]

Automatically translate RSS feeds with Google Reader and Firefox


Ever wish you could RSS feeds in German, Russian, and Japanese without taking the time to learn those languages? Sure, you could just visit your favorite Chinese websites every day using a web page translation service. But Download Squad Reader Patrick Hornik turned us on to a much better method.

Google Reader Translate is a Firefox add-on that adds a translation feature to Google Reader. It won't translate full feeds for you (that would probably take forever), but it does translate every headline in a given feed. Click on the article and it will open up in a new window using Google Translate.

Unfortunately, while Google Reader Translate converts any language covered by Google Translate to English, Slovak isn't one of them. And that's the language the article describing this Firefox add-on is written in. It's not too hard to find the download link though. Just scroll through the page until you find the text "je možné inštalovať tu (XPI súbor)"

In order to translate a feed, you'll need to rename it in Google Reader, placing a three character preface before the title. For example, if you want to translate German to English, you would name the feed .de [feed title]. For Spanish, you would use .es [feed title].

[Thanks Patrick!]

Microsoft launchs Windows Live Translator beta

Windows Live Translator
The arms race between Microsoft and Google has just gone up another notch with the release of Windows Live Translator. Much like Google's Translate Tool, Windows Live Translator lets you enter a block of text for translation from one language or another, or you can enter a URL to have an entire web page translated. Also like Google, Microsoft's web-based translation tool is powered by Systran.

But the interface is quite different. Enter a URL in Google Translate, choose your language options, and you essentially see a full screen version of the website with the text replaced by a computer's best guess of what each word and phrase means. Windows Live Translator doesn't have a full screen option, but gives you a choice of views:
  • See each page side by side
  • See one page on top of the other
  • See the original page, with each line translated as you hover your mouse over it
  • See a translated page with the original text of each line displayed as you hover your mouse over it
You have a variety of languages to choose from, including Arabic, Chinese, Dutch, English, French, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Russian, and Spanish. But as with any machine based translation, don't expect Windows Live Translator to give you a perfect translation. But it should give you a good idea of how much that Japan-only notebook computer you've had your eye on really costs.

[via Google Operating System]

Help make Google translations better

Google Translate

Google has added a new feature to its translation tool: "Suggest a better translation." When you're reading a Google translation, the new tool gives you a chance to catch mistakes and send them to Google, which will help the developers improve translations down the road. It's not clear if this is a learning feature of the translation software or if a real person will read your suggestion and figure out whether to make a change.

Here's how it works. As you read a page, if you move your mouse pointer to a line of text, that text will be highlighted and a little "suggest a better translation" link will pop up.

Of course, this begs the question, why are you using Google to translate pages if you already know how to read them?

Right now only a few languages are supported:
  • English to/from Arabic
  • English to/from Chinese (Simplified or Traditional)
  • English to/from Russian
  • Simplified Chinese to/from Traditional Chinese

Real-time translation for Yahoo! IM

Yahoo! MessengerA company called AvMedia has released an open-source translating proxy for Yahoo! Messenger. It does translation between English, German, Spanish, French, Italian, and Portuguese using Google's web translation services. Considering the state of machine (or at least Google) translation, this is bound to cause all sorts of comical misunderstandings.

[Via Slashdot]

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