What is Multilingual

Multilingual is a Safari 5 extension designed for people who deal with texts in multiple languages on a daily basis.
We specifically focus on translation of individual words and only target Safari. For Firefox and Chrome,
there is a number of nice extensions that together provide pretty good experience.

Features we have in mind

• Multiple providers that can cover many language combinations. Hand-pick best dictionaries out there, do not target just one (that may
  be excellent for Spanish but fail to support Portuguese, for example).
• Efficient shortcuts that do not clash with system-wide shortcuts (like it is the case with some Firefox extensions)
• Translation of words on double-click (very efficient but may not work on some websites).
• Both “display a pop-up” and “open a new tab” modes.
• Aggregation of multiple sources (only makes sense for “pop-up mode”).
• Keep track of words and phrases you translate most often.
• Fall back to text-oriented translators (like Google Translate) for full phrases.

Unfortunately, except for Google Translate, many excellent dictionaries on the Web do not provide API in any
form. This increases amount of work and will possibly break Multilingual when sources update their page markup.

How to install and use it

Download extension package and double-click
the file.

Right now we provide several hardcoded shortcuts that translate selected word:

• Option/Alt + Shift + d translates from your primary target language into language of your choice (LoC, either English or Spanish right now).
• Option/Alt + Shift + s translates from Spanish to LoC
• Option/Alt + Shift + f translates from French to LoC
• Option/Alt + Shift + p translates from Portuguese to LoC
• Option/Alt + Shift + i translates from Italian to LoC
• Option/Alt + Shift + g translates from German to LoC

If at least one word on the page is selected, contextual menu (that you see on right-click) has multiple
“Translate from …” items.

But isn’t Google Translate, like, the best?

Google Translate may be a fine translator overall (don’t quote us on that) but as a dictionary,
it is years behind many other resources on the Web (like Wordreference).

But isn’t Langalot an awesome dictionary for the 21st century that is super-efficient?

Langalot is fast and definitely doesn’t feel like product of early 90s but it uses too few sources
(mainly Wiktionary) and thus is nearly useless for idiomatic expressions. It also does not
“de-conjugate” verbs (an important downside for Romance languages, for example) and when number of
possible results is large, it’s “nice Google-like UI” falls down on it’s face.

Try querying Langalot for “dit” and see what it yields.
Then try Wordreference. Oceans of difference.

A work in progress

Multilingual is still a work in progress. It effectively works with just one source at the moment.
However, it already saves it’s author tens of munites every day.

License & copyright.

Multilingual is licensed under Apache 2.0 license.
Copyright 2011, Michael S. Klishin and other contributors.