Firelang is a sophisticated add-on with an incredible feature set that helps users learn a new language while surfing the Internet. For that, it comes with several tools.

Probably the most common of them all is a translation add-on, to translate selected words while surfing. The add-on comes with several dictionaries included, and options to add more dictionaries easily.

All dictionaries are available on right-click after selecting a word or phrase. The add-on furthermore remembers the last used dictionary and displays it prominently to save some time.

Included in the initial configuration are dict.leo.org, lingvo.ru, Wictionary, Urban Dictionary, Google Define and Wikipedia.

A unique feature from what I can tell is the translation history. Firelang keeps record of all translated words and their context, giving the user the opportunity to take a look at the words and their context at a later time, again with possibilities to display the translation.

And while we are at it. The history can be exported as flash cards. The program exports them into a text file which can be accessed in a standard text editor, printed, or imported into the popular Flash card learning software Anki.

But that was not still everything the history feature is good for. Firelang offers to highlight words in the history. How does it work? If highlighting is enabled in the add-on’s options, all words that have been translated in the past are highlighted on all pages they appear on in the browser. That’s great for seeing them in different contexts for instance.

Firelang offers several tools that are useful to users who are learning German. For one, it offers to colorize all German nouns in text. This is important for languages like German that has genders (unlike English which does not).

There are furthermore several language learning tools available. The article hiding tool removes articles from pages, replacing them with interactive placeholders which show their article on mouse-over.

Firelang offers several additional features that are well thought out. It is for instance possible to bind domains to dictionaries, good for learning multiple languages. The program offers hotkey support and lots of configuration options in the program’s settings. Definitely a tool to check out, especially for users who are learning German.

The translation is the only constant when it comes to those third party tools. The main difference is accessibility and the extra features that the developers have added to those apps.

One of the most comfortable options is the Google Translate Tooltip userscript. What does it do? It basically displays a tooltip whenever text is selected in the browser. Hovering the mouse over the tooltip displays the translation right on the page.

google translate

This by default works on every http page on the Internet, and benefits users the most who often receive messages or read textual contents in foreign languages. The userscript works fine on sites such as Twitter, Facebook or Google Mail (after configuring https sites to be included).

As mentioned earlier, the tooltip is displayed on all pages by default, even if those pages are in the native language of the user – or more precisely the default system language. That can quickly become annoying. The userscript thankfully has an option to prevent this from happening by configuring it to only work if the Ctrl key is pressed at the same time.

Once configured this way, Internet users who want to translate text on a page need to press Ctrl, select the text and then the tooltip. If they select text anyway else it will not display the tooltip. This configuration menu can also be used to enable support for https websites.

The options of Google Translate Tooltip hold preferences to select the from and to languages manually. Here it is possible to change the default to translation language English to another language.

Finally, the script offers search options right in the translation tooltip.

google translate search

Links lead to searches on sites such as Google Search, Wikipedia, Youtube or the Urban Dictionary. The tooltip stays on the page until the next left-click on an area outside of it.

Google Translate Tooltip offers fast translations for users who prefer to stay on the page during the translation. The userscript only works in the Firefox web browser, and can be installed on the official userscript website. New users need to remember to install the Greasemonkey extension first, before userscripts can be installed in the browser.

Now, you could have different pages like “about_english.php” and “about_spanish.php”, but this would make updating a pain, and very inflexible, plus if you have 20 languages, it means 20 files per page. So how do we get around this? Let me introduce you guys, to PHP constants.

A constant is defined just like a variable, but as its name suggests, it is in fact constant. It can be echoed just like a variable, and is great for defining set pieces of text. Let me show you my method of using constants to easily keep multiple language versions of a webpage, without having to have multiple files for each page.

First of all, let’s take a look at how to define constants. Constant names are uppercase strings, but must not begin with a number and should not start with a special character. For example, let’s define a constant:

define(“NAME”, “Daniel Pataki”);

In this exampe we have defined a constant called “NAME”, and gave it a value of “Daniel Pataki”. I gave the constant a describing name, so I know that this constant holds my name.

The way I create multiple languages is that I create 1 language file for each language. I name them according to the standard 2 letter convention. The English file is named “en.php”, the French would be “fr.php” and so on. I include the language file the user needs at the beginning of all my other files containing text, so they will automatically be defined. There are many way to approach this, but for now, let’s say that the page is always in English, unless a user clicks one of the language links. So at the beginning of the code I would write:

<?php
if (isset($_GET['lang']))
include($_GET['lang'].”.php”);
else
include(“en.php”)
?>

This way the relevant file will be included only. Each file contains the list of definitions I need in the same structure. My name in the English version is “Daniel Pataki”, but in Hungarian we put our family names in the front, so in “hu.php” I would define it as:

define(“NAME”, “Pataki Dániel”);

In the page’s code, I can then simply type the following to display my name:

<h2><?php echo NAME ?></h2>

This would show my name as a level 2 heading. If the user is viewing in English, the output would be “Daniel Pataki”, if the user is viewing in Hungarian it would display “Pataki Dániel”, since this time “hu.php” is included, and not “en.php”. Notice that when displaying contants you do no need to put any special characters before or after the constant name, just type the constant itself as you defined it.

You can use this method to create languages for larger sites too. The reason I especially like this is that it is quite easy to translate the site, you just need to send the file over to someone and he will be able to do it easily, without any training. If you have a larger site it might be a good idea to indicate where the constant will be used. You can do this by defining a constant name like “SIDEBAR_COMMENTS’, or “CONTACT_NAME”. This way you and your translators will have an easier time, especially if you also use PHP comments in the language file for further pointers.

<em>If you liked this article, perhaps you’d like to take a look at <a href=”http://scriptastique.com”>Scriptastique</a>, which is a blog (and upcoming tutorial site) aimed at professional and aspiring coders. We just started, but there are daily posts and the tutorials (along with screencasts) are on the way!</em>