Google Translation On-the-Fly

Most people are familiar with Google Translate, which will allow you to translate any text you key or paste, or a URL you supply, from one major language to another. But for entire pages, it's kind of a hassle to copy the URL, bring up the Google Toolbar or the Googlebar Firefox extension, you can simply go to the toolbar's "Page info" button (blue circle with a white "I"), and select "Translate to English" from the pull-down menu. This will translate the entire page, but only from a foreign language to English. With the Google Toolbar you can also do a "word translation." Use the Googlebar Options menu to set this feature to or off. To use it just hover your mouse over a foreign word and the translation will pop up. If you don't want the toolbar installed in your browser-and I understand many do not want it-you can use what is called a "bookmarkelet" or a "favlet." (A bookmarklet is a small JavaScript program that can be stored as a URL within a bookmark in most popular web browsers, or within hyperlinks on a web page. Because Microsoft Internet Explorer uses the term favorites instead of bookmarks,bookmarklets are also less commonly called favlets or favelets.) A bookmarket can be installed right into the Links section of your browser. Then, when you have a foreign page up, just click the bookmarklet to translate it on the fly. John Hiler of Microcontent News has created the Google Translate! bookmarklet for on-the-fly translation. of any webpage from French, Spanish, Portuguese, German or Italian into English. Joe Maller has created quite a few specialized bookmarkets that translate English to and from Spanish, Italian, German, French and Porteuquese. I'm sure their may be other translation bookmarklets around if you search the web. Mark Fleming is the founder of a new blog called Google Tutor & Advisor