Tool Time Friday | Tower of Babel?

Well, not really.

How about BabelFish?

BabelFish is an easy, highly customizeable, and fast Firefox translation extension: Provides two translation services and additional access to Google’s dictionary!

Translate words or a whole text…

- with a doubleclick.
- just by highlighting
- just by hovering a word with the mouse
- via context menu
- with a middle mouse click
- with Alt+leftclick
- with Alt+rightclick
- even supports keyboard only operations

The translation will be displayed as a small popup on the same page, right below the text you wished to translate. So you can keep your eyes on the text and there is no need to close another translation-window. Optional the translation can be displayed in a separated panel below the document or as really tiny tooltip when you hover a word with the mouse.

Currently available translation services are Yahoo and Google including Google’s dictionary. Quickly (one click) switch to the other service to see an alternative translation result. This is an important feature as the translation services sometimes provide different results for the same text.

Easily switch the translation direction (one click): The backwards translation offers a good way to check a translation for correctness (e.g. in textareas). BabelFish provides many additional features like language detection, service fallback algorithm and even auto-language can be configured.

To change the language you may use the statusbar icon, the FireFox tools menu or just click ‘L’ while a translation tooltip is visible. Creation of predefined translations turns any language switching to a simple task. A copy button makes it easy to copy the translation result to another destination etc.

What can be easier?