life.i.think: There's a Babelfish in My Browser!

There's a Babelfish in My Browser!
Scribbled on May 19th. 5 comments.

How’d he get in there!? Through greasemonkey of course!

What’s New?

Translate selected text works! Yipee kiyi yay! (see changelog for more details)

My first script! Places a little fish icon near focused textfields and allows you to translate the text to the language of your choice.

Currently the script is set to translate from english to spanish. You can set different languages by modifying the js. Soon I will convert to a full fledged extension with a preference pane to set language options and whatnot.

Download

The latest version can be downloaded here: babelfish.user.js

Things Left to Do

  • Convert to extension. – This will allow a preference pane for language selection.
  • Button to revert back to original text.
  • Super crazy translate as you type mode!

Changelog

  • .3 (5/22/2005) – Translate selected text! Woohoo! Being able to do this was a big motivation behind this script, as now you can just translate that one word you can’t think of when typing in a foreign language! Also fixed small bug with spinner hiding itself even when work is being done.
  • .2 (5/20/2005) – Added spinner, translucent fish, and a few small optimizations.
  • .1 (5/19/2005) – Basic functionality.

Known Issues

  • My particular brand of screen scraping breaks on large bodies of text. Looking into why …
Comments

Leave a response

  1. Jesse – May 19, 2005 @ 08:05 PM

    You roxxor!!!! This is really cool!

    I want to send you money…. (50 cents only!)

  2. chad – May 19, 2005 @ 08:06 PM

    awesome! You should do this for chat rooms. That way I can get drunk and talk to foreigners. Keep it up!

  3. em – May 21, 2005 @ 11:47 AM

    dude, you are such a geek. nice project. sooo keep workin’ at it, I’d like to see French, Polish, Slovak and as an extra challenge, Russian, on the language pref menu :)

  4. Doug – June 12, 2005 @ 08:03 AM

    How does one set the language preference? ¿Cómo uno fija la preferencia de la lengua?

    (Well, at least now I know it translates into Spanish…) (Bien, por lo menos ahora sé que traduce a español…)

  5. Britt – June 29, 2005 @ 03:44 PM

    Hey Doug,

    I’m going to update this very soon to make this easier, but for now just change the line:

    url: ‘http://babelfish.altavista.com/tr?lp=en_es&text=’ + text,

    where en_es are the from -> to language codes.

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