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Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

I've long wanted an extension that rather than translating a full page, translates just the word under the mouse -- ideally without causing any reflow -- so that I could try struggling through reading a foreign-language page, incrementally learning the words as I progress.

Anyone seen such a thing?

It seems it could also mix well with this 'Polyglot' approach, by throwing in some percentage of pre-translated words, or remembering words known/unknown and differentially displaying those.

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I can recommend qstardict and its variants. I use it on my nokia n800 and computer desktops (kde/gnome) and it's very useful. There's also ports for other platforms. I can select a word (and optionally press a key combination) and it automatically searches the word in dictionaries. There's also plenty of dictd clients that do the same. The advantage is that it works everywhere, not only within the browser.

There's also some firefox extensions and konqueror (KDE) can also easily do this by enabling the dictionary search engines, when pressing the right mouse button over a selected word.

It's specific to Japanese, but rikai(chan|kun) has been an _extremely_ useful tool.

Rikaichan[1] is indeed useful, but if someone want to learn Japanese using it, they have to be a little careful since Rikaichan use EDICT, it could led to pretty misleading translation[2] sometimes when taken out of context. (Compared to Progressive[3].)

(Mac OS X users already has Progressive dictionary built-in, just enable it in Dictionary.app and press Cmd+Ctrl+D over the word you want to lookup.)

[1]: http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

[2]: http://jisho.org/words?jap=ねこ&eng=&dict=edict

[3]: http://dic.yahoo.co.jp/dsearch?enc=UTF-8&p=ねこ&dtype=...

I'm using http://www.lingoes.net/ for this (unfortunately, Windows only).

The Google Toolbar for Firefox does this (and doesn't cause any reflow since it uses a tool-tip). My wife uses it to help her learn English. I don't use it, so I don't remember if the following is true, but I would guess that you can configure it to translate between any pair of languages supported by Google Translate.

Not an extension, but does what you describe.

http://lingro.com/

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