When you are travelling through another country and you are afflicted like I am by the English disease – inability to really speak new languages, it is a real bind but generally you muddle through with the help of obliging friends and colleagues, and very patient locals. This is fine but then you are faced with trying to figure out exactly how the PAYG 3G Broadband works, how you buy it, how you top up etc. You find yourself scouring through websites in the evening trying to figure out what ‘découvrir cette offre’ means, generally by copying and pasting into various translation services.

This is all a little clumsy. This is where my new found conversion to Google Chrome comes in, as it has a really good feature where it will detect that you are viewing a website in a different language to the settings on your PC and then offer to translate the text in situ.

It actually will show the text in the web page exactly where the original language text was placed. Not only that but it will also pop-up the original language when you mouse over the text, further aiding your identification of context to go along with the converted text (to sort out that engagement is actually contract in this context!). It will even keep context of your selection through this website, thus presenting the entire site for the session in your selected language. This is an absolutely fantastic feature that I use all the time and on its own could justify moving to Google Chrome (as well as the speed, auto-update, and sync capabilities). Obviously it does not work with Flash or graphic embeds, but I am sure that the Google engineers are working on this.

So fire up your current browser and download Chrome, you can run it all in parallel with your existing browser to ensure compatibility with your specific sites but I find that Chrome works with all of the sites I access without problems.