If like me your French is more effluent than fluent, then those clever little devils in Google’s basement labs have developed a browser just for you, Google Chome
Just download and install Google Chrome on Linux, Mac OSX and Windows and it has an automagical translator built in. It is based on the Google translator, but there is no installation or extensions, it is built into the browser.
Any site you visit that is in French ( and many other languages), it will ask you if you want to translate it. You can also tell it to always translate any pages that you visit that are in French.
Now, this is not the universal language translator that we are all waiting for, as some of the translations can be quite comical, but in 95% of the sites I have visited it works very well.
Give it a go, and it could make your French surfing just that bit easier. The other lovely side benefit is that it's massively faster than Internet Explorer 7 & 8 and Safari, and you will really notice the difference.
Hope you find this useful
Nick
PS I help work on the Google Chromium project - the open source version - so if you need any help on installing just drop me a note.
Jan, I agree Firefox is a great browser, and it doesn’t surprise me you can do it with the Google toolbar, though I didn’t know that was part of what it offered.
The fact it is built into the core of Chrome just makes it so much easier, but I agree that would also be a great solution to the same problem, and would work on any browser that supported the Google toolbar.
You wouldn’t get all the other great benefits of speed,security and bookmark sync you get with Chrome, but Firefox is a great browser and I can understand why people might be reticent to make the move.
David, when you install Google Chrome it will ask you if you want to bring your IE bookmarks across and will do it for you automagically. If you have a problem with that, you should be able to save your books marks to an HTML file in your home directory from IE, and you can then just import those back into Chrome. I’m afraid I don’t use windows due to it’s many security problems, so I have lost touch with IE.
Another nice feature of Chrome is that you have an automatic bookmark/tabs/profiles sync utility built in, which stores them on your Google docs directory. This allows you to move between any of your computers, log on, and all your books marks are there waiting for you. This is extremely useful if you have laptop, desktop, netbook and tablet like I do and want to keep them all in sync.
You can do exactly the same with Firefox Weave with all operating systems, but unfortunately IE does not have this feature built in, but I would suspect you might be able to download an extension to do a similar task.
Nick
I currently use IE. Can you tell me if it is possible to bring across my Google bookmarks to Chrome and if so how it is done?
I surf with Firefox but have a Google toolbar installed and that also signals up the fact that a site is in French and kindly offers to translate it for me. I have to say I’ve never put the translation to the test though.
Jan