Shortcuts for Google Translating a page in IE

Google Chrome has some nice features, one in particular being the automatic translation. Unfortunately the performance on my home machine was awful, with long pauses before loading pages despite the usual attemps to cleanup, reinstall etc etc.

In a fit of frustration I tried IE, and was pleasantly surprised to find it very fast and very usable, with the exception of the translation part. Bing isn’t very well integrated, and simply doesn’t do very good translations.

I don’t like the Google Toolbar, but needed a button to do one-stop translation of the page, and found two solutions.

1. Use a Javascript bookmark in the Favourites bar

The following bookmark will take the current URL and open in it Google Translate:

javascript:window.open('http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u='+encodeURIComponent(location.href))

To install this in IE

  1. Bookmark the normal Google Translate page translate.google.com.
  2. Edit the properties of the new bookmark to set the URL to the javascript above.

You can change the target and interface language by modifying the tl=en and hl=en parts respectively.

2. Set up Google Translate as a search provider

By setting up Google Translate as a search provider, you can send the current address bar content in two clicks.

  1. Use the tool at the following page to create the search provider: www.enhanceie.com/ie/SearchBuilder.asp.The URL you need to use is: http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=auto&tl=en&u=TEST
  2. To do the translation, click the little down arrow by the search button in the IE address bar, and click the Google Translate button twice.

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