Instant word and phrase translation in your web browser

Open Forum
1

Hey everyone, I’m sure many of you know of this trick, but for those who don’t its real handy for reading in target languages in your web browser while not on the LingQ website (while we are still waiting for the bookmarklet that is :wink:

The first step is to install the Google Toolbar in your web browser of choice. I know some of you don’t like the idea of installing another browser toolbar, but chances are that many of you already have the Google Toolbar, and you can always hide the toolbar when not using it or uninstall it if you decide to use a different method.

Go here to get the Google Toolbar : http://toolbar.google.com

Once installed, go to the Options (the picture of a wrench on the right of the toolbar)

Go to the Tools Tab

Make sure that “Translate” is selected (the check box is checked) and then click the +Edit to edit the options, such as which language to translate text into and languages not to translate.

Now when reading a website/blog/news article in a foreign language simply hover the cursor over a word to have a little context label pop up with the translation. Its practically instant and saves the time of having to look up the words in a dictionary during those marathon reading sessions. To translate entire phrases or sentences, just highlight the section of text that you want translated.

There are alternatives to using the Google Toolbar if you wish, I just listed the toolbar version because it works in all of the major browsers. I know Firefox Add-Ons for Google Translate, and I’m sure IE, Chrome, Safari have translate plugins for their browsers as well.

2

I’ve had a play with a few language plug-ins, and I like the IM translator plug-in for Firefox best. You select a phase, passage or word, then click the button for a translation to the language of your choice. Another button click and you get text to speect.

I suggest you choose the “use google translate” option because google’s translations seem to be better that the IM translator’s own.

3

Hey thanks for the suggestion!

I found a pop-up chinese dictionairy for Chrome called ‘Zhongwen’.

one of the interesting features that it includes is the ability to send words to Skritter (an online SRS based chinese character learning system.) Well I was thinking, wouldn’t it be really awesome to have a browser plug-in that would let you make lingqs wherever you are.

or better yet, a browser plugin that would let you use lingq functionality! That would be awesome. Somebody needs to get to work on that right away!

4

We are, in fact, working on making it possible to create LingQ wherever you are. Give us a little more time.

5

oh, sweet

I think you just made my day! :smiley: