Multi-lingual Browsers & Translators

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Google Translate

Type text or a website address and Google can translate it into the language of your choice. Constantly improving and one of the better options out there.

The Understanding Language Initiative

The Understanding Language Initiative, developed at Stanford by well-respected specialists in the ELL world, links the common core standards in science with literacy.

This site provides resources to educators so they will be equipped to enable learning the more demanding content in science standards.

Characters, Symbols and the Unicode Miracle

Tom Scott explains how Unicode and UTF-8 "hack" solved the problem of representing all the symbols, characters and letters that are used worldwide. Blame it all on the Internet.

YouTube URL: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MijmeoH9LT4

larger image of https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en

image of https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/173424?hl=en

Using Google Chrome's built in translation service

If you use the Google Chrome browser, this resource shows you how you can change the language Chrome uses and have Chrome translate webpages for you.

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image of https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/search/?q=Lanuage%20Translation&sort=recommended%2Cusers&type=extension

Firefox Language Translation Support

While the Firefox browser does not have the out-of-the-box translation capabilities of Chrome, there are a number of add ons that will give you the same capabilities.

Some of the add ons will allow you to highlight a selection of text and get a quick translation. Useful when the page is in your language, but a comment or other text is not.

Put yourself in a non-native speaker's shoes..

Want to give your students an idea of how a U.S. web site looks to a non-English speaker?

Use Google Translate to convert a popular web site (or your school's web site) into something like Romanian, Filipino or Russian. Then ask them to find some item of information on the page.

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image of http://www.fileformat.info/info/unicode/block/index.htm

The Unicode standard arranges groups of characters together into blocks. Blocks include everything from Basic Latin characters (which includes English), Greek, Arabic and Thai to Emoticons, Currency Symbols and Mathematical Operators.

This resource lists the complete list of blocks currently defined and allows you to see which characters your web browser can display.