Welcome to BabelFish Translation
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1. BabelFish quick start:
To translate a single word, simply doubleclick it! To translate a
text (more words), first select the text, then ... You will see a blueish tooltip popping up right below the selected text (you might prefer panel mode instead). It shows the translation according to the current language settings. Please make sure that the correct languages are selected. There are 4 ways of language
selection, the most common two are as follows: Note: If you just installed BabelFish, already opened Tabs or windows must be reloaded to activate BabelFish there! |
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Topics: 1. Quick start 4. Switch the
translation service 7. Preferences:
Accessibility 10.
In case of problems
...by tooltip click or statusbar symbol leftclick
Left-click on the statusbar-symbol
 or click on 'L' while the tooltip is shown.
The language configuration always consists of two language menus, one shown after the other: (Hover or click to
enlarge image) The first menu is used to select the source language, meaning the language you want to translate. As soon as you selected the source language, the second menu will pop up. (Hover or click to
enlarge image) The second menu is used to select the target language. The target language is the language you want to see when translation has been done. As you can see, the two menus look the same, except the colored headline. Skip a menu by clicking anywhere outside of the menu (e.g. you want to change the target language only). The currently selected languages are always shown as international language codes in BabelFish's blueish translation tooltip (hover to see full length language names). BabelFish's statusbar icon tooltip also shows the currently selected languages. Note 1: Usually both translation services, Google and Yahoo, are available for a selected language pair. However, some translations are not supported by both services. Note 2: To easily access languages, you
may also...
...using predefined languages by right-clicking the statusbar symbol (Hover or click to
enlarge image)
To switch the languages you can use (or add)
predefined status-bar menue items. Simply right click
BabelFish's status-bar symbol, then click the desired
translation.
To add a predefined translation to BabelFish's status-bar menu, right click the status-bar BabelFish symbol and select 'Add .... to menu'. The translation added depends on your currently selected languages. To remove a predefined language from status-bar menu, right click the status-bar BabelFish symbol and select 'Remove ... from menu'. The translation removed depends on your currently selected languages. To use the keyboard based language configuration you have to go to BabelFish's extension preferences. If you choose to do so, you must click the 'BabelFish preferences' item located in the Firefox tools menu. Then the preferences dialog is shown and allows to check the 'Show keyboard based language configuration' item. That done, you will see the keyboard based language configuration dialog whenever you press Alt+Ctrl+l. To invoke BabelFish's translation tooltip you most likely want to use the keyboard too. BabelFish's accessibility preferences offer the usage of Alt+Ctrl+b for that purpose. ESC will hide the translation tooltip. (Hover or click to
enlarge image) The picture shows how the keyboard based language configuration dialog looks like. Here you will configure both languages, source and target language, at once. Supposing you want to translate english text to german language you would select english as source language. As you can see, the code for english language is 'en', so you first would enter 'en' (without quotes). As you want to translate to german language in this example, you would enter 'de' (german) as second language code. The image shows the correct input for a translation from english to german language: 'en de'. Note: For the same languages you could have
entered both: 'en de' or just 'ende' (always without
quotes).
(Hover or click to
enlarge image) To start a translation you need to know the name of the source language. BabelFish's 'Detect language' context menu item will help you finding the appropriate language name: Select a word or better a whole sentence, then click 'Detect language'. In most cases there should open a message box presenting the name of the language together with the probability of information correctness. Note: If possible, BabelFish will automatically change the source language according to the detected language.
While the tooltip is shown you can click on 'D' to set the source language automatically. The translation service tries to detect the correct language and automatically re-translates the text with the new language settings.
4. Switch the translation service
As BabelFish depends on the services translation
capatibilities, the translation results may vary if
another service is choosen. This can also mean that you
get a completely other translation, depending on the
service used! So one of BabelFish's great advantages is
the ability to quickly switch to another service. To
use another translation service, click on the
translation service display item. You will receive an
immediate translation from the other service.
Note 1: Usually both translation services, Google and Yahoo, are available for a selected language pair. However, some translations are not supported by both services. Note 2: It is also possible to change the default translation service.
5. Reverse translation (check for translation faults)
Clicking the language display item in BabelFish's
tooltip will switch the translation direction (swap source and target languages). Use this feature to get a reverse
translation of a text that has already been translated. The result will be translated once
more, but backwards now. So you can check translations
for correctness.
6. Copy text and text replace functions To copy a translated word to the clipboard, doubleclick the word inside of BabelFish's tooltip. If you are inside of an editable region (e.g. in a text-area) a doubleclick will replace a selected word with it's translation! You can also select and copy the result as usual.
Preferences Show translation tooltip
on... Translation results... 
Note: When BabelFish's translation tooltip or panel is shown, you can always start or repeat a translation manually by pressing the fish button! Additional settings... Tooltip text settings...
8. Default translation service Choose the preferred translation service here: Yahoo or Google. It is recommended to use Google as default because Google supports more languages. You may also switch to another service when BabelFish's tooltip is shown.
...available languages and "Auto-language" You might consider BabelFish's language menus as overloaded. In deed there are many languages that are needed in rare cases only. So you may wish to remove some languages from the translation menus to get a faster access to the remaining languages. To do so, select in the right column the language you want to remove and click the 'Remove' button. Repeat this step for every other language to remove. There is always an option to revert the removal of items, either by using the 'Add' button or by pressing 'Reset'. The 'Reset' button will add all available languages to BabelFish's menus, including the "Auto-language". (Hover or click to
enlarge image) "Auto-language" currently is limited to
Google-translation. So you will not get any alternative
translations from other services! With the
"Auto-language" setting the translation service tries
to auto-detect the language of the source text. This
works fine for many times but there are a lot of cases
where it fails, especially if you translate single
words! Just imagine you translate a word that is common
in different languages but has different meanings as
its meaning depends on the language. The translation
service would have difficulties to determine to which
language the word belongs. This would result in a wrong
translation or even an error code in return. Be warned,
that will happen more often than you might expect (and
is the reason why "Auto-language" is not available per
default). Note: It is NOT recommended to use
"Auto-language". For the following items please see the
"In case of Problems"
topic:
a) Website
incompatibility b) Translation service
failure c) Mouse hardware
incompatibility d) BabelFish does not appear on a
special site e) Language support f) Other or unsolved
problems
This extension is based on a public userscript named 'babelmousish'. I like to thank Luca Cignoni from Italy for having the idea and for the creation of that userscript.
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