Comments on: Wordchamp: hover over a foreign-language word and get its definition

Wordchamp: hover over a foreign-language word and get its definition

goodnewsfortheinsane — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:42:30 -0800

Wordchamp lets you view foreign-language web pages with definitions in your language as mouseovers (registration-only).

When you've registered, you can enter a language pair and a URL into Wordchamp's "Web Reader" and a definition will pop up when you hover over a word. It's sad that it's registration-only, and I can't vouch for the quality of the dictionaries; but I've found it quite useful in making some sense of web pages in different languages.

By: orthogonality

orthogonality — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 18:55:49 -0800

"nationalsozialistischer: no translations were found for this word"

By: jrockway

jrockway — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:10:26 -0800

Here is a similar firefox extension.

By: Rhaomi

Rhaomi — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:11:13 -0800

I just installed a great Firefox extension that does much the same thing using Google Translate. You just press Alt and click on a word to get a little pop-up bubble with the translation, or highlight a section to translate it all. You can also translate the whole page. It autodetects the language of the text and changes it to your language by default, but you can also tell it what language to translate into. And, because it uses Google's services, it's capable of changing any of the 25 languages it recognizes into any other, so if you have some pressing need to change a Greek phrase into Norwegian, it can handle that (with varying degrees of accuracy, of course). Official page Video tutorial Wired article on statistical machine translation (the technique Google Translate uses)

By: Rhaomi

Rhaomi — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:13:19 -0800

Oh, and since the extension is experimental, you have to sign up for an account at addons.mozilla.org to download it through there. If you don't want to do that, you can get the .xpi through the developer's site here.

By: yort

yort — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 19:21:56 -0800

Popjisho already does this for the CJK set.

By: greasepig

greasepig — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 20:56:25 -0800

Also, see rikaichan for Japanese. It's quite awesome.

By: lukemeister

lukemeister — Sat, 05 Jul 2008 21:57:23 -0800

Snarkless question: Why is this better than just using Google Translate?

By: thedaniel

thedaniel — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 00:38:53 -0800

Well, lukemeister, I speak and read Japanese pretty well, but not at a native level (especially not the reading) - so when I read Japanese news for practice, I can hover over the occasional word for a definition and pronunciation. (I use rikaichan for this)

By: Betty Tyranny

Betty Tyranny — Sun, 06 Jul 2008 07:10:00 -0800

What a coincidence. I just found this site the other day because I recently moved to Germany and I need help with the verbs. It's excellent. A lot more straightforward than Beolingus.

By: zouhair

zouhair — Mon, 07 Jul 2008 18:02:15 -0800

Check qtl too.