Add Instant Translation Into Firefox

Posted on January 30, 2007

I’ve written before about how Firefox’s search box (which lets you plug in search engines for thousands of sites) is really, really cool. But here’s something that makes it even cooler.

Did you know you could use it as a universal translator?

It’s true. Among the many free plugins for the Firefox search box offered by The Mycroft Project, you can find plugins that hook it up to both Altavista’s Babelfish translator and Google’s Translate service:

• Get Altavista Babelfish plugins
• Get Google Translate plugins

With these, you can translate to and from English into most major languages. This is insanely useful for those times you see a snippet of text in another language on a site, and wonder what it means:

Now you can just paste it in the search box and get an instant translation. It’s not quite a universal translator (good luck getting automated translation into, say, Urdu), but it’s a step in the right direction!