A Babelfish bookmarklet

I've been longing for a way to do on-page translation - you know, highlight a bit of text and see its translation inline (dodgy though machine translation is). It's not a HUGE bother to go to Babelfish and do the job there but still just a bit too much of a bother. Today I wanted to see what a Portuguese blog was saying about us (beyond what I could hazard with my spotty knowledge of other Romance languages) so I thought, sod it, time to try and do this.

Well, there's no public API for Babelfish (at Google, Yahoo! or Altavista) as far as I can tell, so doing what I really want to do isn't going to be straightforward. Getting the text translated means receiving the results as a full HTML page, so embedding the translation alone will involve some screen-scraping. The next best thing would at least be to highlight some text and go straight to the translation, so I've made a bookmarklet for the job: trans PT_EN

If you want this, drag it to your Links bar in IE (or right-click, save to Favourites>>Links), and in Mozilla drag it to your Bookmarks toolbar (I may have remembered this wrong). By changing the language pair indicated at the end of the redirect URL you can modify this for lots of other languages (this one is pt_en i.e. Portuguese to English). Personally, I may not use it very often, I'll have to see. Let me know if it's any good for you. You'll currently need a different bookmarklet for each language pair, of course.

I hope I can make some improvements. One would be letting the user set the language pair each time - perhaps with a prompt box. Perhaps the next thing would be to pass the translated page through a Yahoo! Pipe and scrape out the translation, to drop it straight on the page.

EDIT: Oh sod it, here's a version that lets you set the language pair in a prompt: translate

EDIT AGAIN: Just seen that Google's translate page offers something pretty much the same, dammit - though not my second option with the prompt. Perhaps I should mod their code, it will be better than mine...