translation

I recently wrote on Freestyle Language about how CaféBabel.com's Tower of Babel has articles about linguistic variations amongst 7 languages published in 7 languages!

I am planning to take this further by adding to Free Language the seven news feeds in catalá, Deutsch, English, español, français, italiano and polski. This will provide a new range of news articles for use learning and teaching languages.

As they say here in Grenada, West Indies: soon come!

I use Firefox for browsing the web. Firefox has so many cool tools - known as "extensions" - for translating words, phrases and whole web pages on the fly with one click.

Free Language has published articles on two of these thus far...

Quick Translation Firefox Extension to Translate Single Words in 17+ Languages
FoxLingo Free Firefox Browser Extension Software for Translating Web Pages

...and there are loads more!

With this quick blog post, I just wanted to point out a pre-defined search for "translation" on the Firefox extension download site. Have a look, try out a few and find one or two that work best for your particular target language(s) and needs. These web browser extensions can be a huge time-save, making your language work online more productive.

Started using a tool with Firefox this morning that I came across yesterday: the WordChamp Firefox Toolbar for instant translation of words while browsing any web page.

It is a really cool tool! You not only get to hover over any text word and get a translation into the language of your choice, often there is an audio recording of the word that you can listen to! Here's a screenshot of it in action - click to see a larger version:

To get the extension, visit WordChamp and look on the left side almost on the bottom where it says: "WordChamp Language Toolbar for Firefox". Click that while browsing the site with Firefox and you'll install the extension and can start using it once you restart Firefox.

A proper article on WordChamp will be out soon on the front page.

Yesterday I made an update to the site that was long overdue: I finally added links to translate the page using Google Language Tools for automatic machine translation.

You can see this banner in the site's footer:

I used the Brazilian flag for Portuguese, the US flag for English, the Spanish flag for Spanish, the Chinese flag for Chinese and the German flag for German because... I just did. At some point, this site is going to be multi-lingual and localized itself, that's just a "little further" down the roadmap for the site!

There are also text links on the bottom right side of every page:

As Google adds more languages, so will Free Language.

I chose Google because I couldn't find any totally free and cool ones that allowed browsing of the site with instantaneous translation. If anyone knows of one, please let me know. For now, this will do.

I just ran across this interesting blog which has French and English translations of the entries.

From the site:

Reflections on words, expressions and the difficulties encountered on the bridge from the English to the French language.

Stripping a text bare to reveal its mechanisms, its internal logic and its meaning to then transfer it into another language as faithfully as possible while using appropriate terminology and style.

Visit this blog.

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