What if translating text to a different language was as easy as highlighting text in your browser?  It can be, if you pick up the gTranslate add-on for Firefox. With gTranslate installed, you can quickly translate any text on any webpage just by selecting the text you want to translate and right-clicking on it with your mouse.

Having worked in the support field for most of my life, I run into foreign languages a lot. While gTranslate is not the perfect solution, it does do the job.  It uses Google’s translation service to do the language conversions. Short of learning a new language, this is the best tool we have to use out there online today.

Some of the features of gTranslate include:

• Option to automatically identify the language of the original text.
• Option to detect the “lang” attribute of the of the selected text (or the whole page).
• Option to set the destination language to the browser locale.
• Replace texts from input and textareas form fields.
• Image title or alt attributes can be translated too.

You can also translate to and from the following languages:

Afrikaans, Albanian, Arabic, Belarusian, Bulgarian, Batalan, Chinese, Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Estonian, Filipino, Finnish, French, Galician, German, Greek, Hebrew, Hindi, Hungarian, Icelandic, Indonesian, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Latvian, Lithuanian, Macedonian, Malay, Maltese, Norwegian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Slovak, Slovenian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vietnamese, Welsh, and Yiddish.

Want to give it a shot? You can pick up gTranslate from the Firefox Add-ons website.

Would you like to have quick and easy access to everything Google with just one or two clicks of your mouse in Firefox?  That is what the Google Shortcuts add-on for Firefox promises to deliver.  The idea here is simple.  This extension will display any or all Google services as buttons next to your address bar or anywhere else you would like for it to show up.

One installed, you can quickly pull up Google Reader, Analytics, News, Notebook, Maps, Mail and anything else that is Google related.  Your shortcuts can also be displayed under a Google icon drop down box, to save on clutter too. 

Now, you might say you do not need access to every Google service out there.  You only need a few shortcuts.  You can easily customize and select which services you can see – and which will be hidden.

Overall, if you are a big Google fan – this is an add-on for Firefox you have to try out.  You can pick up the Google Shortcuts add-on for Firefox on the Firefox Add-ons web site. 

gTranslate

With gTranslate you can translate any text in a webpage just by selecting and right-clicking over it. The extension uses (one of my personal favorite translation tools) the Google translation services to translate the text.

Translator

There is a lot to be said for being easy to use.  The translator add-on is web translation extension that allows you to translate any web page into nearly any language at the click of a button.  It supports Google’s translation tools, Yahoo!’s Babelfish, PROMT, freetranslation.com, Altavista’s translation tools, and Im translator.

FoxLingo

If you want a powerful translation tool, look no further than FoxLingo.  This add-on for Firefox will do web page translation, search translation, auto translation, has resources for learning languages and much more.  Powerful is the key word here as it can translate full web pages (over 1,500 different language pairs).

So which is the best translation toolset for Firefox? I will leave that up to you.  If you want something powerful, I would say go with FoxLingo.  If you want something quick, gTranslate is the way to go.  Translator sits in the middle, as a good balance between the two.

The extension uses the Google translation services to translate the text. Pick it up, and find out what the French have really been saying about us all this time.

[Learn More About gTranslate!]