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Frengly Translates Text, Auto-Detects Source Language
Posted by Adam Pash at 7:00 AM on December 2, 2008
Online language translation app Frengly autodetects the source language of text and quickly translates it into your language of choice. Just paste any piece of text into Frengly, hit translate, and let Frengly take care of the rest. Frengly actually plugs into the Google Translate API to both detect the language and to translate the text, so you may wonder: Why use Frengly? Ultimately it's about speed and ease of use. Google Translate requires you to choose the auto-detect option every time you head to the page, which means you lose a step in what should be a feature that shaves a step off translation. Likewise, it's easier to select your destination language once from one of the many buttons rather than dig through the drop-down menu. So while Frengly isn't all that innovative on its own, you can think of it as a nicer front-end to Google Translate.
Google Reader and Google Translate have teamed up to bring a neat new feature — you can choose to have feeds in Google Reader machine-translated on the fly. For instance, if your Google Reader language is set to English under Settings > Preferences, a subscription to a blog in Japanese will appear (more or less) in English. It doesn't seem to have been rolled out for everybody quite yet, as some of us at Lifehacker could access the option on the Feed settings drop-down menu and some couldn't. A neat trick, but the automated translations still have a tendency to be unintentionally hilarious. Users of the new Reader feature are promised that as Translate gets better, so will the translations of the feeds. 
If you've ever stumbled onto a foreign-language YouTube video and you're dying to know what's happening, you may be in luck: YouTube has added support for 
The Google service that's super handy when you're travelling internationally (or just headed to multi-lingual city), 
Coder Mike Brittain has put together a super-clean site for iPhone, Blackberry, Opera Mini, and other mobile browsers that lets you quickly click two languages to translate words or phrases between and then do it. The site supports 11 languages at the moment, and you can easily bookmark a language pairing for quick access while travelling. Those without data connections should try 
Windows only: Ever use an online translation service and wonder if you can get more accurate results elsewhere? Translate.Net, a free Windows translation aggregator, knows just how you feel. The desktop app puts your words or phrases through 17 different language translation engines and dictionaries, letting you scroll through and compare results. A total of 25 languages are supported, but the program remembers your recent translation directions to save you the time of scrolling to find the right pairing. A great tool for language learning, or just seeing how different one phrase can be interpreted. Translate.Net is a free download for Windows systems only, requires .NET Framework 2.0
Lifehacker reader Rodrigo writes in with advice on how to do one better than the very literal word-to-word translators available out there. What's the problem, you might ask? Well, you might want the Spanish word for "foundation," as in the base of a building, but most translators will give you "fundación," as in charitable organizations, when you really want "cimentación." In these cases, Rodrigo says:
The How-To Geek weblog highlights a translation feature new to Microsoft Word 2007 that—obviously enough—translates highlighted text directly in Word. To use it, highlight your to-be-translated text, head your the Review ribbon, and click the Translate button. Word can translate either the entire document or just your selection, and it does it through an online translation service. The number of available languages is impressive, so you should be able to translate virtually anything you need. If browser-based translation is more your speed, check out the 
