Maybe I’m looking for too much. Over the past few days, for whatever reason, I’ve run into a relatively large number of websites in foreign languages. Which I don’t speak. At all. So I need some way to get those websites into English. Google Translate, of course, is widely used, and for my needs does an excellent job. But to use Google Translate, I need to first go to the website that’s in a foreign language, grab the URL, go to Google Translate, paste in the URL and hit the translate button. That’s a lot of steps.
If I was using the Google Chrome web browser, it would be a different story. Google Chrome scans each website and when it finds one not in my default language, offers to translate it for me. Very handy! But I’m usually running Firefox, which doesn’t offer the same service. So I’ve been trying out different extensions, and haven’t been 100 percent happy with any. They all absolutely do the job, but there are always one or two quibbles I have with each of them, leaving me less than 100 percent satisfied with any of them.
But like I said: maybe I’m looking for too much. But I did recently try out a Firefox extension called Google Translate It, and of all the options I’ve used, it is the most similar to the function built into Google Chrome. Using Google Translate It is simple. It’s a Firefox JetPack, but you install it just like a standard translation. Once installed you’ll see a new icon down near the bottom of the page. When you find a website you need translated, simply click this button and you’ll be taken immediately to the Google Translate site, where your page is already translated.
It’s pretty slick. And what I described is also the entirety of what it does. Unlike other options, it doesn’t translate highlighted text (but neither does Google Chrome, without an extension!), meaning it’s only good for entire pages. And generally that’s fine, except sometimes I’ll find myself on a message board where only a couple comments are in something other than English. In those cases I don’t need the entire page, but only the comments. For that, Google Translate It is of no use. But it does come close to how Google Chrome behaves.
There is only thing “wrong” with it, as I see things. The icon at the bottom of the page is a massive waste of vertical space. Instead of adding itself to the status bar, it creates an entirely new bar – above the status bar – solely for the single icon. In effect, you now have more than half an inch of wasted space at the bottom of every single web page, whether it needs translating or not.
If you could move that icon – to the main toolbar, for instance, where other extensions have no problem placing their icons – it would be a big, big difference. I’m using a laptop with a widescreen monitor, so anything that takes away vertical space is a big no-no for me.
Still, it does do the job. It’s a relatively new extension (it’s currently at version 0.1.1), so there’s definitely room – and need – for improvement. Hopefully it will arrive, because the functionality is there. It just needs a few tweaks in the visual department to be all the way “there” (at least for me).
Note: Google Translate It, while it works quite well, has not yet been updated for Firefox 8.0, so anyone who has already upgraded their web browser will need to find a new translation extension, at least until Google Translate It is (hopefully), upgraded as well.
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/161922/