Simple Translate for Firefox

Besides burying yourself in books or online courses, you can learn a foreign language by simply visiting websites written in that language and trying to translate words or phrases by looking them up in a dictionary.

On the other hand, you can take advantage of online translation tools (like Google Translate). Designed for easy usage, Simple Translate is a browser addon for Firefox users, which can translate words or entire phrases on the fly.

Instead of having to copy and paste text in a box, select the target language, and click a button to learn its meaning, you can just highlight text and click a button that pops up right next to it, offering to show the translation in the middle of the screen. This addon is ideal for users who are always in a hurry, even when it comes to reading news.

That little box we talked about, the one that shows up on text highlights, only gets triggered if the language of the selected text is different from the target. This means that it doesn't interrupt you all the time, which would have forced you to temporarily remove the addon when you're not working with foreign languages.

Alternatively, you can click the browser icon next to the Firefox menu to view a small window where you can manually enter text and pick another target language than default. The tool even gets integrated into the Firefox right-click menu, offering to translate the entire page or selected text only. By the way, the default target language is Icelandic and can only be changed from the settings panel.

This place has other useful options too. More importantly, you can set a secondary default language that Simple Translate will switch to, if the source is the same as the primary target. For instance, when the primary target language is set to English and the secondary to German: if the highlighted text is in English, the addon skips the primary language because it would be redundant to translate English to English, and makes the translation to German instead.

As far as additional configuration settings are concerned, you can disable the button popup if you just want to activate Simple Translate when clicking its icon next to the Firefox menu, disable the context menu integration, and customize the main panel (panel, button and font size, button position).

All aspects considered, Simple Translate does an excellent job at quickly translating selected text. It's not clear which translation service is used, though.