Installation and Use of MeFluent for Firefox (beta)
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This early version still has some bugs.
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Executive summary: install the MeFluent add-on and configure it to your
languages, then use Google Translate™ with matching languages (a context-menu command "MeFluent Translate" provides quick access to such translation).
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Visit the MeFluent description on mozilla.org and click the "Add to Firefox" button there. Below are some of the steps that happen after you install (the link opens in a new page). |
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Restart Firefox.
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The list of Add-ons shows up when you restart the first time. Otherwise, if you don't see the list,
just bring up the list via the menu "Tools > Add-ons". Within this list of your currently-installed add-ons (see the picture
below), scroll to the entry for the MeFluent add-on and click on its Options button.
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Click on the button "Options" to bring up the Options for MeFluent dialog as shown below.
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Enter the foreign language(s) that you are learning, as well as your native language and your email address (email is optional, but we'd like to have a way to contact you for very infrequent notices about MeFluent). In the sample shown, the person is a native English speaker who is studying Spanish and Japanese.
Close the Add-ons list when you are finished. |
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Navigate to a foreign-language page that interests you and use the "MeFluent Translate"
command available in the context menu: right-click on the page to show the
context menu, and select "MeFluent Translate".
Or, you can start at the Google Translate™ service and enter the webpage address (URL) of a foreign-language site, specifying the to/from languages that you entered into MeFluent.
For ideas of what to read, see popular pages for various languages (all the links in popular pages open in a new tab, so you can refer back to these insructions). An online newspaper may be a good starting point. Note: all the pages that are linked from a translated page are also translated automatically.
MeFluent will automatically recognize a page converted by Google Translate™. It compares against the to/from languages that you specified. If there's a match, MeFluent hides the translations until you mouse over some text. The whole process may take a few seconds, depending on the speed of the host server and other factors. |
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AFTER you use MeFluent once (including some mousing to show translations), and then view another translated page (or just refresh the current one), MeFluent will offer you a quiz, and keep track of your daily usage in the past week:

MeFluent adds this info to the top Google panel that is shown above the translated page. On the right, there is a green checkmark for each day in the past week that you have used MeFluent. On the left is a "Quiz" disclosure button to show a short quiz about one of the translations you saw. |
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If you click on the "Quiz" button, you can see how well you remember what you had translated before:

Clicking on the Quiz button a second time will hide the quiz. |
The name "MeFluent" is a nod to a
funny book
about language and cultural learning.
"Google Translate" is a trademark of Google, Inc.
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