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why does greek english translation not work in babel fish on firefox v 10.0.2?

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After a recent update to Firefox V10.x.x, Babel fish translation is broken in both directions for Greek and English. When pasting a small greek text line into babel fish and hitting translate button I now get a result like this : γιατί κατάν Input a small english phrase and the result box for greek is blank. Can I do something to fix my browser of choice and carry on learning another language?

After a recent update to Firefox V10.x.x, Babel fish translation is broken in both directions for Greek and English. When pasting a small greek text line into babel fish and hitting translate button I now get a result like this : γιατί κατάν Input a small english phrase and the result box for greek is blank. Can I do something to fix my browser of choice and carry on learning another language?

All Replies (11)

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Maybe use Google Translate instead if Babel Fish isn't working with Firefox 10 (I also see empty text, only punctuation).

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This does not really address the question of what has changed in V10.x to break the Babel fish ability to use the greek font. Why should I have to use an alternative translator when the original functionality of Firefox could be restored. At the moment it has been compromised. What else is no longer possible in Firefox? Will I find another failure that forces me to use another browser? Can the developers of Firefox take this seriously enough to perhaps implement a fix? Will they even hear about it?

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I don't know what is causing the Babel fish site not to work anymore in Firefox 10+ versions, so I offered a workaround until this get sorted out and fixed.
You can try to contact the site and ask them to look into this.

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I also use Firefox Version 10.0.2 on a Mac OS X Version 10.6.8. And I have previously used Yahoo! Babel Fish fairly frequently without any problem. Now if I input Russian (in Cyrillic alphabet), Chinese (in Chinese characters), or Greek (in Greek alphabet), they are all transformed into garbled characters (e.g., & #1050; & #1080; ), and the output window shows the same mess. If I input some English text and let Yahoo! Babel Fish translate it into one of those languages, I get a blank space.

However, if I use Google Translate, I don't have the problem. And if I use Yahoo! Babel Fish on Safari on the same machine, I don't have any problem either. This fact seems to imply that the source of the problem is not Yahoo! Babel Fish, but it's Firefox.

qquito modificouno o

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Hi qquito, I accept that there are other means of translation. I am using them. I still regard Firefox as having had some of its functionality BROKEN by a recent "upgrade". The question is whether or not anyone who who produces these upgrades can be bothered to fix this issue. optimystically, Steveski05.

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Today I updated Firefox to Version 11.0. The problem with Yahoo! Babel Fish persists.

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I am having the same problem too, with translations to and from Russian in Cyrillic. I simply get a - in the translation box, or a bunch of numbers and ####. It was never a problem until I upgraded my Mozilla. Ever since then it has not worked. Very annoying.

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I have exactly the same problem using Babelfish to translate to and from Chinese. It started after "upgrading" Firefox. The "translation" is some sort of numeric codes of the form #nnnn. Google translate works OK. The problem clearly lies with the Firefox "upgrade".

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The problem seems to be that Firefox isn't sending an Accept-Charset header to the server and that makes the server send the page as ISO-8859-1 and thus makes Firefox send the data as ISO-8859-1 that the server doesn't seem to understand.

The server sends a Content-Type: text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1 in the response header and two meta tags in the HTML file (that Firefox ignores anyway).

<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1">
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

POST data with ISO-8859-1 encoding:

ei=ISO-8859-1&doit=done&fr=bf-res&intl=1&tt=urltext&trtext=%26%23947%3B%26%23953%3B%26%23945%3B%26%23964%3B%26%23943%3B+%26%23954%3B%26%23945%3B%26%23964%3B%26%23940%3B%26%23957%3B&lp=el_en&btnTrTxt=Translate

If I add a correct Accept-Charset header with Live Http Headers and replay then the encoding in the response header is UTF-8 (Content-Type: text/html; charset=UTF-8) and it works OK.

Accept-Charset: ISO-8859-1,utf-8;q=0.7,*;q=0.7

POST data with UTF-8 encoding:

ei=UTF-8&doit=done&fr=bf-res&intl=1&tt=urltext&trtext=%CE%B3%CE%B9%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%AF+%CE%BA%CE%B1%CF%84%CE%AC%CE%BD&lp=el_en&btnTrTxt=Translate

I don't know why Firefox is no longer sending an Accept-Charset header.

cor-el modificouno o

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Thanks Cor-el. You have more patience than me. Keep up the good work.

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Yikes, that is way too complicated and technical. I guess the BIG question is- how do we get Mozilla Firefox to fix it? Or do they just not care? Or do I permanently switch back to Internet Explorer now because it's too much trouble to have to always switch from one to the other?