I love finding new extensions that do things I never even thought to search for. One of the best ways to find them is through word of mouth. In this case, I guess you can call it “word of blog”. I’m doing a series of blog posts about the extensions I use, and maybe you’ll see one that you want to use.
The first one is Context Search, which I’ve already blogged about.
The second is Clippings, which I’ve also blogged about.
The third is gTranslate. gTranslate is pretty simple – it translates text you’ve selected using Google’s translator. I find that I use it most on Facebook. Sure, Facebook has a built in translation tool, but that uses Bing, and I find that the Google translator works better.
On that note, if you prefer a different translation tool, there are probably other extensions that do the same thing, but use your preferred tool.
To translate text on the fly, just select the text you want to translate, right-click on it, and move the pointer to the context menu item called “Translate“. It should auto-detect the which language you are translating from, and show you the translation. If you want to change the language being translated, you can do so using the sub-menus.
You can install it via the Mozilla Add-ons site.