language

Non-Foreign Language

Modern browsers help break the language barrier by including features that translate the text of a website into the reader’s language. I find the Edge browser to be most useful for this. I’ll show how these features can help me use DeviantArt, Wikipedia and Twitch. My experience is based on the browsers available in Windows 11.

I’ve got some friends on DeviantArt who are from France. Often, they have image descriptions, comment threads and blog posts in French. Rather than being locked out of their community, Edge helps me automatically translate the messages to English.

Edge offers a few multilingual options.

One allows me to highlight the text I want to read, right click, and select “Translate to English.” This will replace the French (or other language) text with English and preserve the formatting.

Another option happens when the browser recognizes a page is French and offers to translate the page once it loads.

Once language features have been activated on a page, an extra icon is added to the right end of the address bar. There are two modes this icon offers. After highlighting a section and translating it with the context menu, the icon allows you to “show original” to undo the translation. After doing that, when you press the icon again, you can select a language and translate the whole page. That’s awkward but it’s a tradeoff because Edge prefers to translate individual blocks of text and not the whole page

There are a few additional tricks that these features include. In addition to inlining the translation, hyperlinks have their text translated but they go to the same destination. When the page has mixed languages, it leaves the English text unchanged. Edge can identify the language of a page without the language being tagged in the HTML.

Another multi-lingual place I go to is the home page of Wikipedia. If I select a language link such as Deutsch it will open the home page for that language’s version of Wikipedia. When the language is supported, Bing will offer to translate the page. The pleasant surprise of translating a whole page is that pages reached from it by a link are also translated automatically.

It is really cool to see the different versions of Wikipedia in different languages since pages are not translated by the Wiki. For example, one surprise discovery was American Football in Germany. I had never heard of professional (American) football teams in Europe.

A third place that I visit that has text in a different language is Twitch. Twitch is an interactive streaming platform that can provide income to the streamers. Often the streamer is playing a computer game but some streamers just hang out or stream about anything else. Usually there is an interactive chat running alongside the video. When the streamer is using a different language, if I select some of the chat, I can have Edge translate the whole page using the language icon in the address bar. My use of this is limited because the audio is not translated.

The additional translation feature that this unlocks causes the chat to be translated as it is updated so that I can follow the conversation smoothly without knowing the streamer’s language.

Of these features, the one that is unique to Edge is that you can select several separate areas of text and translate them individually in place while keeping the formatting the same. The text that hasn’t been selected is left alone. The sections do not need to be in the same language.

Firefox and Chrome have similar translation features. One feature that is different is that they prefer to translate the whole page instead of sections of it. In addition, they aren’t as successful at preserving the formatting. An additional weakness of the current version of Firefox is that it can mangle English text that is mixed in when it translates the full page. (Firefox marks its features as beta at this time so that will probably improve.)

Firefox and Chrome are weaker than Edge when you want to translate blocks of text. Firefox will show the translation of the text in a separate edit control and Chrome only previews a short section of the translation. Both will not show the translation in place unless the whole page is translated. Another weakness of Chrome is that it does not dynamically follow a chat window as it updates.

An interesting feature is how they deal with documents that contain three or more languages. For this, Chrome wins. When it translates the whole page, it translates each language section to English. Edge can be coaxed to translate both languages, but it requires several steps. Firefox will only change a single language when it tries to translate the whole page in place.

These translation features are really useful. They let users read text from all over the world without needing to learn a new language. I didn’t evaluate the quality of the translated text so it would be a separate project to evaluate the Edge’s translator, the Bergamot translator used by Firefox and the translator used by Chrome. Those are surely under active development so any evaluation would be limited to the moment the evaluation takes place.

The help pages for these browsers don’t appear to describe the ‘Translate to English” context menu that all of the browsers have. They allow one to translate a section of a page instead of translating the whole page. Even though it is missing from documentation, all three browsers support it. Edge has the block translation capability more thoroughly integrated into the browser. I use that most often.

Listening with your mind’s eye

I notice that I visualize the letters of the words that people are speaking. I see the text as the words pass. I wonder whether other people experience a visualization like this.

If I were to learn a new language, the need to spell text might be limiting.

Arabic and Farsi would first require me to learn how to pronounce and write Arabic script. It would be an added step that I wouldn’t have learning new European languages. I don’t think visualizing it would be a great challenge once I could read and transcribe words.

Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, might be acutely difficult for me to learn. Since words are not written phonetically, I would need a completely new level of interpretation to see what I am hearing. I suspect that skill would develop very slowly (if at all.) There are phonetic transcriptions of the sounds, but if the variations in the pronunciation of words is subtle, I might not “see” the correct “text.”

In some languages, people speak more words per minute than in English. Would my ability to visualize the words be overwhelmed by the speed that the letters go by?

What would happen if I had a stroke that broke that neural link between my hearing and the visualizations? I wonder whether I could track a conversation when I couldn’t see the words anymore.

I believe song lyrics access a different part of my language system. When I read the lyrics to familiar songs, the words don’t register as familiar. Often, I find that I never really knew what the song was about. My visualizations didn’t seem to help. I’m wonder whether a PET or fMRI of me listening to a song and its lyrics would be different from one recorded while I listening to the same words as prose.

It’s interesting to notice skills that are natural to me. It would also be interesting to learn skills that are natural to other people that I’m unable to experience.

An aptitude might be broken down into micro-level skills. Some may take practice to develop fully. It is a form of neurodivergence to identify skills that might be missing in one person and robustly available in another.

Consider the ability to recognize faces and the ability to visualize images. I’ve heard informal suggestions that people have different levels of proficiency. These are examples of everyday skills that might have a spectrum of ability. Mathematics may be hard for some people because some necessary sub-skill is neurologically disadvantaged.

Brains are mysteries full of puzzles. They hide individual differences. I don’t know things that I can’t do that are natural for you. It’s hard for you to know things I take for granted that you struggle with.