239508 - Add page translation bookmarklets to default bookmarks

Status: RESOLVED FIXED

(Camino Graveyard :: Bookmarks, enhancement)

Description

[Jasper]

The google and babblefish webpage translation tools have become increasingly
powerfull over the last couple of years. The power behind it is the systran
translation software.

Unfortunatly only few people know it exist and even less use it. Mozilla has a
translation tool but it's really dumb. I would like to have a slightly more
powerfull version, not the less very very easy to use.

The idea is to add a toolbar item (a flag) which can be clicked to tranlate the
viewed webpage. The source and destination languages can be selected by using
the small down arrow on the right corner of the toolbar item.

The toolbar item would only be enabled when a webapge is available.
Not when:
- we are in bookmark manager.
- an already translated page is open.
- a blank page is displayed.

Related Mozilla bugs (thanx stuart):
Bug 123064, Bug 135181, Bug 228004

The top 3 website to translate webpage:
google - http://www.google.com/language_tools
bablefish - http://babelfish.altavista.com/
systran - http://www.systranbox.com/systran/box

A screen shot is comming up.

Comment 1

[Jasper]

Attachment: A mockup of what it might look.

As I said, it should be really easy to use and I hope I succeded to make the
mockup UI as simpel as possible.

Comment 2

[Stuart Morgan]

I definitely like the idea.

UI-wise, I wonder if the list might be more manageable as nested menus, so that
the first level is just a list of source laguages, and each has a submenu of
possible destination languages.

Comment 3

[Jasper]

I had a chat with a friend and het had some cool ideas:

Why not use the page encoding and the system language prefs to create a
recommendation part in the pop-up menu. That would make the choices much easier
for our users.

Comment 4

[Steve Ruge]

Couldn't people just google for or go to those translators on their own?

If this idea is a go then why not implement it as follows:

Why not just make it a Flag of the user's system set home language (for example
for United States users as set in System Preferences a USA flag would be
present) and put the flag in the lower right corner of the browser window (since
this is something that would affect the browser page)? Clicking on your home
flag would bring a pop-up of available languages to translate that page into.

Comment 5

[Jasper]

(In reply to comment #4)
> Couldn't people just google for or go to those translators on their own?

Well the whole idea of this, just like the google search toolbar item, it to
make it easier for users.


> If this idea is a go then why not implement it as follows:
> 
> Why not just make it a Flag of the user's system set home language (for example
> for United States users as set in System Preferences a USA flag would be
> present) and put the flag in the lower right corner of the browser window (since
> this is something that would affect the browser page)? Clicking on your home
> flag would bring a pop-up of available languages to translate that page into.

Well it's a tool and not page related such as security and pop-ups. And we don't
want this thing to be in the window all the time, it's an option.

Comment 6

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Ping. This is an excellent idea.

Using the encoding of pages to determine language is the best option we have. I
really think we should go forward with this using Google on the backend. What
would be the hardest part of this? It's simply knowing the link structure of
those three websites and utilizing them. Setting up the redirect shouldn't be hard.

I also think we should get this in for 1.0. Doing so would put us ahead of other
browsers in at least this aspect (and lots of others, but that's another bug). 

Jasper, what do you think about reviving this conversation and seeing how hard
implementation is.

(CCing Wevah)

Comment 7

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Adding comments based on chats in IRC.

By default, we should use Babelfish simply because it supports more languages.
This should be configurable via user.js. Using Babelfish seems really easy as
the url setup is *so* simple. Here is an example:
http://babelfish.altavista.com/babelfish/trurl_pagecontent?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.caminobrowser.org&lp=en_fr

This would mean simply replacing the url with the one we want translated and
replacing the final string with the appropriate language codes. Easy enough, eh?

Also, to alert the user they are viewing a translated page, we should put a
miniture icon in the location bar where the security icon is located.

For security reasons, we should *not* support the https protocol.

In addition, we should add this to the "View" menu.

Comment 8

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

As nice as this idea is, this should be WONTFIXed, because we're not going to have built-in parts of the Camino UI depending on 3rd-party web services.

Comment 9

[Jasper]

Well in that case let's remove google search and the lot. And hey Apple is a third party so let's not support osx!

Comment 10

[Stuart Morgan]

Why not just ship with a folder in the bookmark menu or toolbar with a bunch of translation bookmarklets? It would be easy to do, easy to change later, and make it clear that it's third-party-provided service.

Comment 11

[Jasper]

Sounds like a good idea.

Comment 12

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

This is the one I've been using for Google Translate (which is nice because it requires no language parameters; it's universal for the languages Google Translate supports):

javascript:void(location.href='http://translate.google.com/translate?u='+location.href)

Ludo, does l10n localise the bookmarks?  If so, then we should just include "foo to English" Babelfish URLs and then let l10n localise those to "foo to lang", which cuts down on the number of bookmarks we'd need to include.

Comment 13

[Håkan Waara]

Speaking of l10n bookmarks:  How about letting all localizers choose all bookmarks so that they are relevant for their country/language?

An example is the fact that Firefox (swedish) as of today is shipped with CNN as a default bookmark (IIRC). For me as a swedish citizen this is not the most relevant or useful source for news...   Should I file another bug for this?

Comment 14

[Stuart Morgan]

(In reply to comment #13)
> Speaking of l10n bookmarks:  How about letting all localizers choose all
> bookmarks so that they are relevant for their country/language?

They already can. Issues with individual localizations should be taken up with the localization project.

Comment 15

[Ludovic Hirlimann [:Usul]]

(In reply to comment #12)

> Ludo, does l10n localise the bookmarks?  If so, then we should just include

Some do. We are loose on the subject. I like the idea of bookmarklets. There is a long term problem with providing such service (and that is different from using a search box) :
 How do we maintain the list of bookmarklets ? 
 Do we provide bookmarklets for all languages supported by systrans ?
 How do we track new languages they support ?

If such feature is implemented I'll add some note for the translations teams.

Comment 16

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: Adds Google "Translate this Page" to Bookmarks Toolbar

For 1.1, let's add Google's translation bookmarklet to the default bookmarks in the Bookmarks Bar.  Rationale for this is because it "just works" (recognizes the source language and translates into the user's preferred language--based on Google cookies) with the languages Google supports (and only requires one bookmarklet to support all translations) vs. the other services, which support a few more languages but require a separate bookmark for each different translation vector.

Comment 17

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Comment on attachment 220759 [details] [diff] [review]
Adds Google "Translate this Page" to Bookmarks Toolbar

Seeking r from Ludo on this.

Comment 18

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Comment on attachment 220759 [details] [diff] [review]
Adds Google "Translate this Page" to Bookmarks Toolbar

Minusing per ludo, because this doesn't actually work the way I thought it did. :-(

Google only automatically guesses languages and translates them into English; every other combination has to be specified explicitly :/

Comment 19

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

(In reply to comment #18)

> Google only automatically guesses languages and translates them into English;
> every other combination has to be specified explicitly :/

This is no longer the case; they now pick up "To" language from your accept-language, and there are also significantly more languages supported now (23 total, all of which can be translated into any of the others).

That means we can consider this for Camino 2.0, if Sam is amenable.

Comment 20

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

(In reply to comment #19)
> That means we can consider this for Camino 2.0, if Sam is amenable.

I am. Is the patch there still good (except the date being bad)? And... are we sure we want this on the toolbar? While I like it there, we added a bookmark there during the last release (Amazon.com) and I don't want to fill the bar too much.

Comment 21

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Given that we added Amazon.com in that spot, I'd have to spin a new patch ;)

Bookmarklets are really things you want to have on the Bar.  Depending on what we do about the name, I don't think it will look too full if we add it to the Bar without removing or re-arranging.  That said, the patch uses "Translate this Page", which is accurate and informative, whereas our policy has been to use the site name/site title in most cases (though the bookmarklet itself won't have a title per se, just the [translated] title of the page being translated).

Comment 22

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Attachment: Unbitrotted

This is unbitrotted, mainly so I can easily apply it to plists whenever I want instead of the more cumbersome manual process, but Sam can also use the patch to ponder the implications to his Bookmark Bar.

Comment 23

[Samuel Sidler (old account; do not CC)]

Comment on attachment 321203 [details] [diff] [review]
Unbitrotted

r=me.

Let's start with it on the bookmark bar and move it later if we think it's too crowded.

Comment 24

[Mike Pinkerton (not reading bugmail)]

Comment on attachment 321203 [details] [diff] [review]
Unbitrotted

rs=pink

Comment 25

[Smokey Ardisson (offline for a while; not following bugs - do not email)]

Landed on the trunk.