Firefox has a great feature that allows you to right click on a search box (form text field) and select “Add a Keyword for this Search” to associate a keyword with the search via a special bookmark. From then on you can run the search by entering the keyword followed by your search terms into the Firefox address bar.
Most of the time this works really well. E.g. you can visit youtube.com, right click the search box and add the ‘youtube’ keyword so that entering ‘youtube ninja cat’ into the address bar will find all ninja cat videos on YouTube.
It seems that it’s a little harder to do this with Google Translate.
I couldn’t find a link to Google’s translation service for a web page, but I did manage to discover it via other means. When found, adding a keyword for the search didn’t work - the URL it was using was incorrect. To fix this I had to edit the properties of the bookmark (right click on bookmark -> Properties) and change the Location to the following URL:
http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&u=%s
sl is the source language, set to auto.
tl is the target language, set to en for English.
u is the URL, set to %s so that it’s replaced by Firefox with whatever you type after the keyword.
With the keyword set to ‘translate’ you should now be able to translate a URL by typing e.g. translate http://europa.eu/index_fi.htm
