Lingro - a very cool inline translation tool

June 11, 2008 by Mark O'Neill |

By Mark O’Neill
Contributing Writer, [GAS]

Being a Brit in Germany, I am constantly learning the German language and I know a lot of Germans constantly learning the English language. So Lingro is a perfect web app for all of us.

It’s a translation tool but with a nice difference. Normally if you want to translate a word on a foreign language webpage, you would open up another browser page and look up one of the many online foreign dictionaries (my preference for German is dict.cc). But it’s a lot of hassle and time wasting doing all of that, when what you would much rather be doing is reading your article!

So, if you know there’s a high chance that you are likely to find words in your article that you will have problems with, put the URL into Lingro and choose your languages :

This then makes each word in the article “clickable”. So if you come across a word that you don’t know the meaning of, just click on it with your mouse and up pops up a box with the translation in the other language :

If you encounter a word you want to remember for later, you can add it to your wordlist.

Lingro also offers browser tools such as bookmarklets but I found the Firefox one to be a bit buggy. I tried it on a BBC news page which had a video on it and the bookmarklet refused to open.

Lingro supports six languages - English, French, German, Spanish, Italian and Polish. The site is an open-source project and not all the dictionaries are finished though.

I’m sure as time goes on and the site is further developed, more languages will be supported. So this is a site to watch if you are a language teacher or a language learner.