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

July 5, 2008 6:42 PM

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.

posted by goodnewsfortheinsane (10 comments total)

"nationalsozialistischer: no translations were found for this word"
posted by orthogonality at 6:55 PM on July 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

Here is a similar firefox extension.
posted by jrockway at 7:10 PM on July 5, 2008

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)
posted by Rhaomi at 7:11 PM on July 5, 2008 [1 favorite]

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.
posted by Rhaomi at 7:13 PM on July 5, 2008

Popjisho already does this for the CJK set.
posted by yort at 7:21 PM on July 5, 2008

Also, see rikaichan for Japanese. It's quite awesome.
posted by greasepig at 8:56 PM on July 5, 2008

Snarkless question: Why is this better than just using Google Translate?
posted by lukemeister at 9:57 PM on July 5, 2008

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)
posted by thedaniel at 12:38 AM on July 6, 2008

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.
posted by Betty Tyranny at 7:10 AM on July 6, 2008

Check qtl too.
posted by zouhair at 6:02 PM on July 7, 2008