MediaWiki talk:Gadgets-definition
Dear friends; please look at the links at user:i18n#useful links. Thanks in advance! Best regards
·לערי ריינהארט·T·m:Th·T·email me· 20:30, 6 February 2008 (UTC)
GoogleTrans-Speak gadget proposed to help learn English change
As one of the aims for the simple English wiki is to help people learn English, I propose my GoogleTrans-Speak gadget for the wiki.
Using GoogleTrans a popup will appear near the cursor, having a foreign language translation of the word (or selected text < 500 characters), when the cursor is over a word in a web page and the SHIFT key is pressed.
The help file on the enwiki for the gadget is at:
The gadget has been running on the enwiki for around 18 months now and has had around 8500 installs (after 6 months of use). It is currently running on 12 wikis.
It can be run on the simple enwiki by including the following javascript in your vector.js file:
importScript("User:Endo999/GoogleTrans.js");
This version has the following text to speech addition:
- if you select some text (<4000 characters), put the cursor within that text, and hold the ESCape key down for a second, then a sound bar will appear. By clicking on the play bar of the sound bar, you will then hear the text selected.
The idea is that people wishing to learn English may not just want the translation of a word or two (or a sentence or two) they don't know, but also may wish to hear the sentence to train their ears (and thus learn to listen to English as well as read it).
I use the gadget (on my private test system) to read French and Spanish webpages, including the eswiki and the frwiki, since I can read those languages but cannot understand spoken speech of those tongues.
The Text To Speech is actually done on my LINUX box in Canberra Australia, so I would like to try out the feature on a small wiki (like the Simple wiki) so the number of requests isn't too large.
Open Source Text to Speech systems are used:
- Festival for English and Spanish
- Espeak for the other languages
- Mbrola contributes the voices for espeak in French and some other languages.
On Firefox 3.5+ a HTML5 audio tag plays an OGG sound file. On IE9 a HTML5 audio tag plays an MP3 sound file On other systems, Flash is needed, a Flash sound bar will play an MP3 sound file.
I think some people learning English may like to play a computer voice of some text in wiki articles. It's a good way to learn to listen to English. You can have the translation into your native language, and then you can listen to the English text selected right in front of you. Listening to the radio and TV is often difficult because the native speakers speak too fast. Festival TTS does not speak too quickly.
You can play the sound bar more than once if you need to listen several times.
It's a good language learning tool and I thought it would be a good gadget for the simple English wiki, which is a language learning wiki.
wiki 1.26 needs change to gadget definition file to support GoogleTrans gadget (and other gadgets) change
wiki 1.26 requires a change to
MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition
to support gadgets. The enwiki version, which is working fine, has this entry in the above file for GoogleTrans:
- GoogleTrans[ResourceLoader]|GoogleTrans.js
(the above bullet is actually an asterick)