I try to read Italian newspapers online. Is there software that will produce on-the-go translations for highlighted words? John Porter
WordReference offers free online translation dictionaries for Italian, French and Spanish at www.wordreference.com. It also offers a toolbar that lets you look up words from your browser, but the results appear in a separate window. The AltaVista toolbar's Translate button lets you translate words typed into the searchbox, text selected on a web page, or pages, but again, takes you to the Babelfish site. What you really want is a toolbar like Google's, which translates words when you hover the mouse over them. Unfortunately, the Google Toolbar only translates from English to other languages, not from (say) Italian into English.
Backchat:
It seems alternative browsers have, in this case, better options than Internet Explorer. Roger Knight suggests using Firefox with the Googlebar, which started when Google's toolbar was only available for IE. Mark Udwin suggests using Firefox with the Translate extension: "Translation is simply a matter of highlighting the single word or the whole article, right clicking on it and selecting the desired language. The translation then appears in a new tab courtesy of Babelfish." Mick Citizen suggests the now free and ad-free Opera browser: "Right-click on a highlighted word, phrase or paragraph in Opera, and a context menu offers Lycos translation to and from French, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese and Japanese", among other things. Finally, Andrew Turner chides me for omitting to mention one of WordReference's best features: its forums. "These are set up for language students (of any age) to help each other learn. They are true online communities where people freely give their time and expertise to help others."
