As an experiment, Slaw has installed a new Google feature that can automatically translate a website into the language used by the viewer's browser. Thus, when we have a reader who comes to us with a browser set to read French or German or Arabic — or any of 50 languages — the reader will see a bar at the top offering in the reader's language to translate Slaw into that language automatically. Readers who come to us with browsers set to English should be unaffected by this feature.
It may be that our French-speaking readers will find this annoying, preferring to read us in English rather than in the poor French that can result from machine translation. We hope that any reader who dislikes this new feature will let us know that. If we hear from you that it's more annoying than helpful, we will, of course, disable it.
If you would like to see this service in action, scroll down the page until just before the end of the sidebar to your right. There you will see a Google Translate button and a drop down list of available languages. Try out the language of your choice. Using this button will make the bar at the top appear, just as though your browser were set to use the language of your choice. Clicking the translate button on that bar will cause Slaw to appear in the language you have chosen. Notice that as you hover your cursor over portions of the text, the original English text will appear in a popup. To put Slaw back into English, click "restore" and when Slaw is restored to English, make the bar go away by clicking the X in the right hand corner.
Very useful. I did notice though that English is not one of the available languages on the drop-down. English would be helpful for the occasional Slaw posts in French.