YouTube Video Demo of GoogleTrans-Speak

The SecureCottage Reference Portal with Roaming Karaoke Text To Speech

Translation of Selected Text (and Text To Speech)
Paul Cheffers

Position the cursor over this word, Dictionnaire, and hit the SHIFT key.

Then move the cursor away from the beige window that has just appeared.

You should see the word over which you positioned the cursor appear in a separate beige window below your cursor. After a second or two you should see the English translation for the French word, dictionnaire in the same window.

In order to get rid of the beige window and resume reading the webpage, simply move the cursor away from the window. Please remember that you can only have one beige window up at a time. If you move the cursor into the beige window, or on a browser scroll bar then the beige window will stay on the screen until you move the cursor away from these items.

On Internet Explorer, Firefox, Chrome, and Epiphany you can select up to 500 characters of text, position your cursor within the selected text and the Reference Portal will translate your selected text.

If you want to learn how to access Wikipedia articles by cursor positioning go here. If you wish a more detailed image of what is in the two types of popup window that appear, go here.

This is the attraction of using the SecureCottage Reference Portal. After you have typed in an URL into the form input window to the right and hit Go To Url, you can position the cursor on any word in any webpage you navigate to and see the foreign language meaning very quickly. At least much quicker than you can look up the dictionary by yourself.

No Toolbars or ActiveX controls are required.

The advantage to the Portal is that no Firefox toolbars or Internet Explorer ActiveX controls need to be installed. There is a real reluctance to download and install these devices on people's computers.

The Portal will try to put the dictionary lookup affect on every webpage you navigate to. However, there are some URLs that will escape dictionary lookup.

Most websites, however, will be have the dictionary lookup feature.

In general the Firefox browser is recommended for this Portal. Internet Explorer may have runtime errors on certain Javascript practices that sophisticated websites use. These will tend to happen if the debugging options are enabled. They will tend not to happen if the debugging options are turned off (default). For the most part, if these errors occur, you can simply say 'no' to the debug question and continue using the website. Windows Safari v3 is also okay.

How do I set the language to translate to?

  1. Position the cursor over a word and get the beige window up.
  2. Then click on the language designator (ie., 'English:French') link. This is the first line of the new beige window.
  3. From there you will be prompted with two combo boxes allowing you to change the From language and the To language designation. (Any combination of these languages will be translated. This setting is permanent until you reset it again.)

How do I reference Wikipedia articles.

  1. Position the cursor over a word and get the beige window up
  2. Click on the 'Wikipedia?' link.
  3. A menu of links will appear in a beige window. A cascade of words will appear in the window, all of these are queries to Wikipedia. Pick the combination of words that equals your query. Usually, if a person, as most likely, you will pick the link with two words. Try it and see how it goes. You may have to allow popups for 'www.securecottage.com' in order for the Wikipedia articles to appear quickly in your web browser.
Caveats:
  1. Iforms in IE are removed.
  2. Movies and Flash files must be designated with absolute URLs for right now.
  3. When using text selection translation, sometimes on IE parts of the selected text will unselect after the beige window pops up.

The Two Kinds of Popup Windows

Here are two gifs that show the kinds of popup windows you will receive by positioning the cursor over a word in a webpage.

GoogleTrans-Speak Voice Origin

GoogleTrans-Speak uses the Festival Open Source Text To Speech machine for English(excellent voice) and for Spanish(good voice)

enEnglish
esSpanish
hiHindi
mrMarathi
teTelugu

GoogleTrans-Speak currently has a 30 day trial of Neospeech voices, which are excellent.

zhMandarin
jaJapanese
koKorean

GoogleTrans-Speak uses the EHKO Open Source Text To Speech machine for Mandarin(good voice speaking characters with tones correct). EHKO also provides Cantonese and Taiwanese.

enMandarin

GoogleTrans-Speak uses various Windows SAPI voices. Most SAPI voices can be spliced into GoogleTrans-Speak easily.

frFrenchATT Natural Voices
geGermanATT Natural Voices
arArabicKOBA voices
idIndonesianKOBA voices

GoogleTrans-Speak uses the ESPEAK Open Source Text To Speech machine, which has the following voices available. (These voices are not top quality but are often quite understandable):

afAfrikaans
caCatalan
csCzech
cyWelsh
daDanish
deGerman
elGreek
enEnglish
eoEsperanto
esSpanish
etEstonian
fiFinish
frFrench
grcAncient Greek
hiHindi
huHungarian
hyArmenian
idIndonesian
isIcelandic
itItalian
kaGeorgian
knKannada
kuKurdish
laLatin
lvLatvian
ptPortuguese
roRomanian
ruRussian
skSlovak
sqAlbanian
svSwedish
swSwahili
taTamil
trTurkic
viVietnamese
mkMacedonian
mlMalayalam
nlDutch
noNorwegian
plPolish
zhMandarin