The New Scientist is singing the praises of a new add-on for the Firefox browser which I’m guessing is supposed to challenge the dominance of Google in the browser-based machine translation market or at least provide an alternativet. Billed as the “Universal translator for web browsers” the World Wide Lexicon Toolbar is available from the Mozilla website and is claimed to make it much easier to translate web pages from one language into another. According to the Mozilla site, the add-on automatically detects the language of the website you are visiting and translates it into the default language of your browser.

The World Wide Lexicon Toolbar at work supposedly

No big deal, you might say, the Google toolbar already does something very similar (although it’s not automatic). But apart from being automatic, the add-on first offers human translations from other toolbar users, then it offers translations from machine translation services including Google, Apertium and others. Sounds really good, doesn’t it? It would be if the thing actually worked! I installed it and visited a couple of high profile German websites and nothing. Absolutely nothing. No automatic translation, not even an attempt at a manual translation. I even went to the Google.de website thinking, how hard can that be? There are only about three dozen words on the page but still nothing.
Now I know it’s only an “experimental” lemon, I mean, add-on but the developers really could have put a bit more effort into this. There’s an old saying about doing the little things well but this add-on doesn’t do anything at all except add some really ugly buttons to my toolbar. I also think the suggested $10 donation they are asking for is a bit cheeky considering it just doesn’t work. Until they get their house in order I don’t think Google will have anything to worry about. If I ever get the thing working, I might revisit it here.