View websites in different languages with Google toolbar.

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. 🙂

Screen-shot of Devilsworkshop in Hindi.

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

Translate from Toolbar

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  • 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

One Comment

Vijay October 6, 2009

wow thats cool… thanks