Have you ever come across a word on a website that you didn’t know the meaning of? Maybe it was a difficult word in English, or maybe in a foreign language. Regardless, wouldn’t it have been nice to be able to click on the word and almost immediately get a defintion? Thanks to a handy Firefox extension called Wiktionary and Google Translate, it’s just that easy.

To install it, first navigate in Firefox to the Wiktionary and Google Translate website, part of the Firefox Addons collection.

Once there, click the green Add To Firefox button to begin the installation process.

You’ll need to verify the installation, then restart Firefox. When you’ve done this, the extension is ready to be used.

So, find your favorite foreign-language website. We chose the Mexican Secretary of Tourism website, but whatever you choose should work just fine.

Now, double click a word you don’t understand. A pop-up will appear with both a direct translation of the word (written in blue and underlined), as well as a definition.

What if it’s not just a single word you need translated, but the whole page? That’s simple as well. Right-click anywhere on the page and choose the Translate Page option.

The Google Translate bar will appear at the top of the page, and in just a bit, the entire page should be translated.

What about English words? As mentioned in the beginning, sometimes it’s nice to be able to get a definition of a word. The Wiktionary and Google Translate extension can do just that, using the Wiktionary database. The procedure is just like with foreign language words. Double click the word to highlight, and a pop-up will appear.

Beyond the obvious, the extension offers a few different configuration options, such as the ability to choose your native language, whether hover-to-translate and select-to-translate are active, and more.

Note: You can find this in the Add-ons page (found by selecting the Tools menu then Add-ons), then scrolling down to the extension’s entry.

In the Style tab, shown below, you can also tweak the look of the pop-up. Here we’ve changed the style to have rounded corners, with black text on a yellow background.

And here are those changes in action.

Google Chrome already offers the ability to automatically translate foreign language websites, and while Chrome is a great web browser, it’s not for everyone. Thankfully, this handy extension offers that ability, nicely integrated with your contextual menus, plus a little more.