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.
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.
The program can only be as good as the dictionaries it queries. Google is currently queried for all the languages, although other dictionaries have been used in the past. SecureCottage queries Google's translation API in a Google approved manner.
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 uses the Festival Open Source Text To Speech machine for English(excellent voice) and for Spanish(good voice)
en | English |
es | Spanish |
hi | Hindi |
mr | Marathi |
te | Telugu |
GoogleTrans-Speak currently has a 30 day trial of Neospeech voices, which are excellent.
zh | Mandarin |
ja | Japanese |
ko | Korean |
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.
en | Mandarin |
GoogleTrans-Speak uses various Windows SAPI voices. Most SAPI voices can be spliced into GoogleTrans-Speak easily.
fr | French | ATT Natural Voices |
ge | German | ATT Natural Voices |
ar | Arabic | KOBA voices |
id | Indonesian | KOBA 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):
af | Afrikaans |
ca | Catalan |
cs | Czech |
cy | Welsh |
da | Danish |
de | German |
el | Greek |
en | English |
eo | Esperanto |
es | Spanish |
et | Estonian |
fi | Finish |
fr | French |
grc | Ancient Greek |
hi | Hindi |
hu | Hungarian |
hy | Armenian |
id | Indonesian |
is | Icelandic |
it | Italian |
ka | Georgian |
kn | Kannada |
ku | Kurdish |
la | Latin |
lv | Latvian |
pt | Portuguese |
ro | Romanian |
ru | Russian |
sk | Slovak |
sq | Albanian |
sv | Swedish |
sw | Swahili |
ta | Tamil |
tr | Turkic |
vi | Vietnamese |
mk | Macedonian |
ml | Malayalam |
nl | Dutch |
no | Norwegian |
pl | Polish |
zh | Mandarin |