How to Set-up Adsotrans Pop-ups in Firefox
May 15th, 2006 by MarkHave you ever been web browsing and wished you could just click on Chinese characters and get pop-up translations? If so, then this post is for you. Adsotrans is the same technology used to create the News in Chinese site. It analyzes Chinese text, guesses which characters should be grouped together as words, and then displays pinyin and translation pop-ups for each word. Before going much further, I should say that Adsotrans is still fairly weak when dealing with traditional characters[1], but if you follow the steps I lay out below, it will be so convenient to use that you’ll find it a great help even when dealing with traditional characters[2]. For simplified characters, Adsotrans is excellent.
1. First, you need Firefox version 1.5 or newer. Opera and Safari users, just trust me on this. If you want to read Chinese online, it’s worth it to use Firefox just for this plug-in. IE users, it’s time to switch. IE is buggy, has poor support for web standards, is integrated with Windows and thus allows minor security problems to threaten your entire system, and lacks many, many features found in modern browsers.
2. Next, you need to install a Firefox plug-in called Greasemonkey. Click on the link I provided, and you’ll see a window at the top of your Firefox window saying that my site was prevented from installing software on your computer. This is for security reasons. If you want to install from my site, click on the edit options button on the left and add me to your list of trusted sites. Or, if you prefer, go to http://mozilla.org and download it from them. After you install greasemonkey, quit and restart Firefox. Now, you shoud see a smiling monkey at the right side of the status bar at the bottom of the browser window.
3. The final stop is to get the Adsotrans user script. Click on the link I provided, and then you’ll see a message at the top of your screen and an install button at the top left. Click the install button and you’re done!
Usage
The adsotrans plug-in is very easy to use. Go to any page with Chinese text, such as my Chinese blog, press “A” on your keyboard, and then click on some Chinese text. A window pop-up and it will have the text you just clicked on. Run your mouse cursor over the words in the pop-up window, and translations and pinyin will appear.
[1]Every time I’ve tried using Adsotrans to adsostate a paragraph of traditional Chinese, it has missed several characters. Before it had problems with chopping 買得到 down to 買, and just today, it didn’t return anything at all for the word 捲. It is getting better though. It’s free, and the author, who lives in mainland China, has chosen to focus on simplified characters.
[2]Though I’ve given up on using Adsotrans for adsostating stuff to put on my blog, with the FF plug-in it’s so convenient that it’s still a very useful tool for reading Chinese online, despite it’s weaker support of traditional characters. I use adsotrans all the time now. I think you will, too, if you install the plug-in. 
May 16th, 2006 at 5:08 am
Hey! Pretty neat tool!!!
Works great for me.
A question I have is how do you determine what mode you are in? I know that pressing A toggles between translate and non-traslate mode. But are there any visual indications other than higlighting text and seeing if it’s on or not?
Also, I can get the little monkey to smile (color) or frown (black and white). It doesn’t seem to affect the translation script in either mode. What does it do?
May 16th, 2006 at 6:34 am
After you press “A”, pop-up translations are enabled until you press something else.
When the monkey is smiling, it means Greasemonkey is enabled. Clicking on it will disable it, and it will frown to show the change in status. The Adsotrans script I put in my post is actually just a Greasemonkey script made to interact with adsotrans.com.
Greasemonkey allows users to make custom scripts to modify the display and behavior of any pages they see. For example, if you didn’t like my choice of colors or the layout of my site, you could make a Greasemonkey script that would make it so that my page would always load up in black and green, and have a narrower main column. The monkey has to be smiling when you load the page for your custom scripts to take effect. Once the page is loaded, toggling it on and off doesn’t have any effect (until you load the next page).
May 16th, 2006 at 11:40 pm
thanks for the tip man.
Though I hate to say it, I’m still hesitant to switch over to firefox. My old computer is terrible, and doesn’t coopererate with me anytime i try installing new software.
May 17th, 2006 at 10:46 am
Mark-san,
My eight-year-old PC with Windows 98SE in it is always making painful efforts to give me its best possible performance. But the Firefox became heavier than usual after I installed the Greasemonkey and the Adsotrans yesterday. I think that it is partly because of an incredibly slow nominal broadband in my town in China.
Giving up it in frustration, I tried to find other tools for Chinese. The Rikai.com is relatively useful although it is not as convenient as the Adsotrans. It sometimes makes a mistake in grouping Chinese characters as words. I am contended with its English-Japanese pop-up translation. But there are no phonetic symbols.
http://www.rikai.com/perl/HomePage.pl?Language=Zh
May 17th, 2006 at 11:37 am
Mark-san,
http://www.popjisyo.com/WebHint/Portal.aspx
This site I have just found is more convenient than the Rikai.com. It also has selections for simplified and traditional Chinese. And its translation is good and clever. I suppose that it is very famous and everybody probably knows it. I may be the only guy who is behind the times.
May 17th, 2006 at 12:00 pm
If your problem is bandwidth, I don’t think Greasemonkey will make it any worse. It sounds like you’re short on either CPU cycles or RAM. That popjisyo.com is a great site, though!
May 17th, 2006 at 1:16 pm
Mark-san,
You are right. I know that it is time for me to buy a new PC. But I am more lazy than frugal…..
May 25th, 2006 at 1:11 pm
This is a great little FF gadget - I, as Hanzi stupid, love it.
I did notice a small problem when I was testing it out. On your site there is some text - 小朋友他們一, when I use the adsotate website it comes up as 小朋友他鍊�一, but when I use the greasymonkey script it comes up 小朋友浠�們一 (That was just part of the sentence I clicked on)
Ah, maybe I just cottoned on - your site is Traditional Chinese…!!??
November 11th, 2006 at 12:51 am
Adsotrans is embarrassingly superior to any other popup-based system I’ve seen. The fact that it is an engine and not just a dictionary link makes it revolutionary for nonfarcial electronic translation of Mandarin.
Do you realize what a saleable product you have here?
I want to buy a standalone version!
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:01 pm
[...] Da ne bom ponavljal tistega, kar so že drugi lepo povedali si navodila (v angleščini) oglejte na strani kamor vas pripelje spodnja povezava. How to Set-up Adsotrans Pop-ups in Firefox [...]
November 23rd, 2006 at 7:05 pm
[...] Najlepše pa kot vedno na koncu. Tisti, ki za brskanje po spletu uporabljate Firefox pa lahko vso to funkcionalnost najdete v Firefoxovem dodatku. Navodila za namestitev (v angleščini) najdete na tejle strani [...]
January 17th, 2008 at 3:53 am
hey, just a quick update.
it looks like adsotrans hasn’t been working for awhile. it is working for you? also, it the adsotrans user script you liked above is gone.
January 17th, 2008 at 4:02 am
David’s CTO at CPod now, so most of his adso-development is for them. Fortunately, he shared his dictionary with a lot of people and there’s an even more convenient solution now.
It’s a Firefox plugin called Chinese Pera-kun.
January 19th, 2008 at 7:37 pm
Warren: we had some server troubles in November-December and the site was down more often that it was up. That’s what budget hosting in Beijing gets you.
We’re back up on a much more stable server now though, and the site is running from the latest code base (v5). Code and database still available at http://adsotrans.com/downloads/. Part of the overhaul included re-writing some of the internal scripts to get everything working with UTF8 instead of GB2312. If the changes have affected any third-party tools, anyone is welcome to contact me and I’ll do what I can to get things working again.