Babelfish

Welcome to BabelFish Translation

1. BabelFish quick start:

To translate a single word, simply doubleclick it!

To translate a text (more words), first select the text, then ...
    .... middle click into the selection  or   left click into the selection while you hold the Alt key pressed.

For other options just change the mouse settings.

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:
- Leftclick on the 'L' while the blueish tooltip is shown
- Leftclick on BabelFish's statusbar icon
First you are asked for the source language, afterwards you select the target language.

Note: If you just installed BabelFish, already opened Tabs or windows must be reloaded to activate BabelFish there!


 

 

Topics:

  1. Quick start
  2. Language selection
  3. Detect languages

  4. Switch the translation service
  5. Reverse translation
  6. Copy text and text replace functions

  7. Preferences: Accessibility
  8. Preferences: Default translation service
  9. Preferences: Other settings & auto-language

10. In case of problems
11. Note of thanks

 

 

2. Language selection

...by tooltip click or statusbar symbol leftclick

languages

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:

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BabelFish source language menu

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.


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BabelFish target language menu

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...
(b) add predefined language pairs (translations) to the statusbar icon:
(c) use the keyboard only

 

...using predefined languages by right-clicking the statusbar symbol

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BabelFish statusbar rightclick menu

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.

...using the keyboard only

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.

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Keyboard based language configuration dialog

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).

 

 

 

3. Detect languages

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BabelFish language detection

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.

detection

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

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)

language

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


BabelFish preferences dialog

7. Accessibility

Show translation tooltip on...
Here you choose what action will invoke BabelFish's blueish tooltip. You can do it using a middle mouse click or with a left click while pressing the Alt key. With those options you first would have to select a text, then to click into the selection. Using a right click is of advantage only if you want to translate a link. Choosing Highlighting text would show the tooltip as soon as you have selected a word or text (no click is necessary). The context menu option offers translation via right click menu (the 'Translate' item). Doublecklick and hover might be used to translate single words. On doubleclick BabelFish's tooltip will be shown. Hovering a word with the mouse pointer will show an even more minimalized tooltip. There is also an option for users who prefer to use the keyboard.

Translation results...
Choose where regular translation results should be shown. Most users will choose tooltip mode as the results will popup exactly at the click position. However there may be a very few sites where the tooltip will not work correctly. In that case switching to panel mode should help. In panel mode the results will be shown at the bottom of the current document. Some users also prefer panel mode because of the better readability.

Tip: In panel mode there is no right click menu: To copy a single word use the keyboard shortcut Ctrl+C. To paste use Ctrl+V (in Germany it is named Strg+...)

The hover-delay setting controls the time that elapses between hovering a text and the appearence of the translation. The delay has effect on hover mode translations only.

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...
You even can translate words or parts of text without any highlighting. The doubleclick option will translate single words only. On other clicks and if nothing has been highlighted, BabelFish will translate the whole paragraph instead - provided that the appropriate option is checked.
Google's dictionary service greatly improves translation of single words. Unfortunately not all languages are supported yet. The kind of improvement is a greater number of possible translations for the same term.

Tooltip text settings...
Change those settings if you prefer another font or if you want to make the tooltip/hover- fonts smaller or bigger.
Use the text-wrap setting to define the maximum width of the tooltip. Text wrap will occur after the defined count of words. A text wrap value of zero means automatic wrapping.


Tooltip color settings...
Here you might select other colors for tooltip text, background and error messages. The color management rates the choosen colors upon readability. You cannot use color combinations that are rated with 'Unacceptable'. To use other colors than provided by the color-picker just doubleclick the appropiate color field and enter a color as RGB value. If you find the color management annoying, the 'extensions.babelmousish.overridecolorcontrol' option, located in the FireFox about:config settings, is for you.

 

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.

 

 

 

9. Other settings

...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".

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Available languages configuration dialog

"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).
Also Google's dictionary service will NOT work if Auto-language is the selected source language.

Note: It is NOT recommended to use "Auto-language".

For the following items please see the "In case of Problems" topic:
-Mouse codes
-Whitelist/Blacklist
-Translation Services

 

 

 

10. In case of Problems

a) Website incompatibility
Symptoms:
You suspect BabelFish to make a website looking weird / behave uncommon. This usually should not happen. However, there may be very rare cases of incompatibility.
Treatment:
First make sure that BabelFish is responsible for the problem.
To test your suspicion, doubleclick the statusbar icon to disable BabelFish, then reload the page. If the problems are gone, BabelFish may be blamed for it, otherwise not. Do not forget to re-enable BabelFish!
If you decide to disable BabelFish for a special site, add the site to BabelFish's blacklist (see preferences dialog). Add a representative part of the sites URL to the blacklist and BabelFish will not load on that site anymore. Please contact me and send the URL of the problematic site.

b) Translation service failure
Symptoms:
One of the translation services always(!) answers with an error code or returns completely inappropriate result text. Note: This does NOT apply, if a translation service simply is not available for a language!
Treatment:
If you have good knowledge of HTML and regular expressions you can edit the service definitions (See preferences, Services tab). Otherwise try to get an updated service definition file or a BabelFish update.

c) Mouse hardware incompatibility
Symptoms:
The mouse (meaning your mouse-clicks) do not behave as expected, e.g. nothing happens if you do a middle click or right/left mouse clicks are shifted when using BabelFish or something similar.
Treatment:
1. Go to BabelFish preferences and make sure that the mouse settings are according to your demands.
    If there is a wrong setting, correct it! (then you most likely do not need the next step)
2. Click the [Mouse Test] item located in the mouse preferences. Follow the instructions.

d) BabelFish does not appear on a special site
Symptoms:
Although BabelFish works fine on other sites, it does not appear on the currently visited site.
Treatment:
Clear your cache, then reload the page and try to translate once more. If it still does not work, switch to panel mode (see preferences dialog).

e) Language support
Please note that BabelFish cannot support translations other than provided by the currently used translation services.

f) Other or unsolved problems
You should...
-Visit my homepage to get the latest version: http://netcat.ath.cx
You may...
-Send an email to NettiCat (Developer of BabelFish). Do not forget to write a detailed problem description (e.g. example site) and to add your email adress. Please use BabelFish as subject.

 

 

 

11. Note of thanks

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.