We often come across several sites that are, or may be useful to us - but we can't use them as they are in foreign languages like Russian, Chinese, etc.

I am using two very useful plugins for the purpose - one in particular, for the past several months & they are too good.

1) Translate

Well, this is a cool extension that translates pages from French, German, Spanish, Italian, Dutch, Portuguese, Greek, Korean, Japanese, Chinese (simple as well as traditional) and Russian too.

It uses the Google translation tool, as well as Altavista's Babelfish translation tool. We have two options to convert the pages - we can either convert the whole page or we can just convert some specific text.

There are some probs too. If we use it too often to convert the whole page, Altavista sometimes blacklists us & gives error. If we convert some specific text, it opens in a new tab.
Due to this new tab problem, i use a second extension that converts the selected text in the same space. Details are below.

P.S. If a page is converted by this extension, the links opened in that page are automatically converted too.

Download this extension here

Supported Firefox Versions - 1.5.0.1
Reliability - Stable


2) Russ Key

This extension translates Russian text on web pages simply by its context menu - shortcut keys are also given. The main feature of this extension is that it translates the text on the same space as the original text and uses 3 different translators (namely AltaVista, freetranslation.com and free.translated.net) using round-robin fail-over mechanism.

Download this extension here

Supported Firefox Versions -0.8 to 1.6a1
Reliability - Strong.

Enjoy!

Although translating a page using a tool is great and all, but seriously, no computer translator will be able to trully translate a full page into proper English. Just take these points into concern:

1. Some words in languages such as Latin possibly, are not in the English language.
2. Some slangs in other languages might be taken literally when translating.
3. You wouldn't be able to translate images.

Nonetheless, a translator would probably be a useful tool in translating just the basics of a part of a webpage but i wouldn't be too dependent on it. This extension is just another one of those services like Google's Translator tool or any other website's translator. No biggie.

hummm.. this should be really handy... especially so since I very often come across news clippings and technical journals in languages quite other than English. Most of the time though, I am quite unable to identify which language I'm looking at (happens very often with european languages that it's quite similar).

I'd use Bablefish to translate - if I could just figure out what language I'm looking at. I wonder if there's some way I could have a script check for the language on a page, recognize it and let the viewer know what language it is (maybe also provide a button to translate the page to a language of the user's choice). That would really sort things out in this rapidly evolving web world where it's quite important to keep plugged into sources of information (of all language areas).

Another good one
Language Translation Plugin For Firefox

You can check this one too
Https://addons.Mozilla.Org/en-US/firefox/addon/5641

-Gilad