There are tons of translation services out there but Lingro, I think, is a little slice of genius. You paste a url into it’s search bar – as below:
It then opens the page with all the text (including the hyperlinks) clickable for translation – so if there’s a word you don’t recognise – click on it and you get a pop-up (quickly too) with a translation into the language you’ve chosen, and an audio snippet of the word in it’s native tongue. This is what it looks like:
The little slice of genius comes because it remembers what words you’ve clicked on – so as you work through a document/page it’s automatically building a wordlist of the words you didn’t know. You can review them in that browser session without having to sign up – and you can sign up in 20 secs without even giving an email address. Once you’ve signed up you can save your wordlists – organise them into groups and test yourself with a flash-card game. You get a quick flash of the full definitions – then you can test yourself with cards that flip between word and definition.
It’s only available for English, Spanish, French, German, Italian and Polish at the moment (though they are adding languages) and it was a bit wobbly on a couple of sites I tried it with (mainly because they had a very cluttered structure), but all in all I’d say it’s just about a perfect Web2.0 service – light-touch, does one thing well, doesn’t make you jump through hoops: and you can upload txt, docs or pdf’s to it if you want help with something not on the web. Bravo Lingro!
reCAPTCHA
You know those funny squiggly words that some sites use when you sign up with them, to confirm that you’re human? Well I didn’t realise that they’re not just there to protect sites against spam-bots – they’re also being used to help Computers learn how to read Old Books.