POPjisyo is a useful application that adds pop-up dictionary capabilities to any site. It’s mainly targeted at Asian audiences whose English may be a little shaky, and who would benefit from a few helpful translations on websites. The service does this by acting as a proxy through which you browse the web. POPjisyo appends a bit of javascript to the page that adds a mouse hovering pop-up to all words with a translation.

Obviously, the pages load a bit slower than before, due to the numerous javascript tags that need to be placed around each word on the page. But, if it helps me understand the text better, I don’t really care about the extra load time. The key advantage that POPjisyo has is that it’s unobtrusive–if you need a definition for a word, simply hover your mouse over it. If you don’t need it, the extra pop-up doesn’t bother you. It’s a great design for novices that are beginning to get a foothold in a new language. This is unlike other services like Google’s Language Tools, which translates the whole page (most of the time, with many errors), which leaves the language student to their own devices to match up the words between the untranslated and translated page.

Apps like these are literally closing in on the language barrier, allowing people to derive value from pages that would otherwise be too difficult to read through. They currently support English to Japanese, Chinese, Korean. Also, they have an English dictionary and English computer dictionary, which will pop up dictionary terms on the fly. They even have a matching game where they pick off random words from the page, and you have to match the English terms to their Asian language counterparts–great for learning a language within the context of real reading material.

I would love to hear about your experiences with POPjisyo if you’re a regular user, and how it helps you out on a daily basis. Also, comment if you know of any other apps that provide language translation services that are equally easy to use.

What I would like to see is a reverse translation for Asian languages to English. It would be nice to finally be able to read and understand the Far East side of the web.

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Categories - Localization, POPjisyo, Language |