How to Translate a Webpage using IE 8

May 28th, 2009 by Ben Carigtan | File in: How-To

For Microsoft’s IE to remain competitive with emerging browser apps like Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome, it needs to reinvent itself every now and then. This is good for end users like us who end up benefitting from such cool updates.

In this post I will focus on one really cool feature that helps users translate a portion of the page (or even the whole page for that matter) into a language they choose.

For starters, Live Search Translator is an online tool where you can enter a URL of a website that you want to translate.

It works like Google Translate [http://translate.google.com] but their output translations are not exactly the same even when you enter the same text and choose a similar output language.

If you ask me which one is better I would say that they are both imperfect tools. The translation is about 70 to 80 percent accurate on both tools so it aims only at giving users an idea of what the content is about. Do not treat them as perfect translations because they are not – that kind of technology is not just here yet.

In IE 8, you can select a portion of text, then right click, then hover (not click) the mouse cursor to “Translate with Live Search”. A pop-up translation tool will appear.

You can change the to and from language selections to the language you prefer.

Unlike Google Translate which offers a lot of languages, this tool only offers only a few choices. If the languages you want are on the list below then you’re safe, if not, well you still have Google Translate.