Google recently announced that it has added a new feature to Google toolbar with Firefox browser. You can now read just about any website in different languages. This is quite different from having a translate widget or button on websites. This allows you to read any web-page in a different language. Below is the image of Devilsworkshop translated in Hindi. icon smile View websites in different languages with Google toolbar.

Screen-shot of Devilsworkshop in Hindi.

translate firefox googlebar1 View websites in different languages with Google toolbar.

Google has released a plethora of applications and options for translating web pages and documents from one language to another recently.

Translate from Toolbar

translate toolbar google2 View websites in different languages with Google toolbar.

  • Google has allowed the Translate button with Google toolbar only with Firefox 3.5 users and above. I guess it will soon be introduced with IE browser in the near future.
  • Just about any web-page can be viewed in many different languages.
  • The Translate feature is synchronized with Private browser feature of Firefox. This mean when you are looking at a website in different languages it turns off features like page history, page rank and side-wiki. The obvious reason for this is that developers might not like their page being ranked or commented on depending on how good the translation of the page is.
  • I have not carried out a extensive study on this but its obvious that some websites will have issues of certain words being translated differently. For instance “Devils-workshop” was translated as “D”, “Evil” and “workshop” as different words. So two words were split into three and that can be undesirable.
  • All said and done it is quite a cool feature and very good for people to read websites in different languages. For instance I read a German website by translating it. The English had its faults but I could get the gist of it very well.

Link: Google Blog