Running a French Holiday Gite in Rural Brittany

Monday, March 26, 2007

Translating French (or lots of other languages) using Google

Hidden away in the corner of the Google translation page I found a useful link the other day to a set of Google translation buttons.

If you're using the fab Firefox browser then you can simply click drag a button to the Bookmarks toolbar (ensure View/Toolbars/Bookmarks toolbar is ticked if it's not visible) so that you have an instant translation engine just sitting there whenever you come across a bit of French you don't understand on the internet. Select the website text using the mouse, click the toolbar button, and you're instantly dropped into Google's translation engine with the appropriate text automatically converted. Easy peasy!

Cleverly Google's translation buttons page automatically recognises if you're using Internet Explorer instead of Firefox and gives you the option of creating an IE favourite which works in much the same way.

I also found on Mycroft's Firefox search engine list a set of Google search engine plugins lots of different facets of Google, including (section 12), a set of dictionary plugins. Select the one you want and it'll install in the drop-down search engine box in the top right of the screen.
To use it simply type the sentence you want to convert into the search text box, click the magnifying glass icon and get an instant translation, courtesy of Google.

Although the translation's not perfect they're usually good enough to get the gist of the content. I'm not going to trust Google with converting my Gite website from English to French though, I will have to find someone who writes far better French than I do and see if we can do a deal (hopefully involving multiple bottles of wine!) - any takers?

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