One thing that popped in my mind yesterday after having a conversation over twitter (admittedly, a service I had rarely used until recently), is that the more followers you have, the higher the odds you would have to use other languages in addition to a lingua franca. This ‘leaves out’ other friends who could have limited knowledge of foreign languages.

This is how the idea for the Tweet Balloon Translator was born. It’s a Greasemonkey script for Firefox, which uses the balloon/hover feature recently introduced in twitter plus the Google Translate service to translate tweets quickly and inline.

You can install the script from userscripts.org or the local copy here.

Development notes

The key phases I outlined for the script were as follows:

1. Establish a working translation block of code using the Google Translate JSON API
2. Research the possibilities of inserting a Translate link in such aspects of twitter as the profile page, direct messages, retweets. The Guest/logged out user scenario also had to be taken into account as twitter serves the pages in a different manner.
3. Figure out a way to use the twitter internal API for the HoverCard balloon feature. This was probably the hardest of all three because of the way these are created and populated.
4. Integrate 1 through 3 in a single script.

Needless to say, the script employs asynchronous requests to Google via the HTTPXMLRequest model so as to not break the UI thread, as well as exception handling.

Please feel free to try out, review, or contribute to the script at userscripts.org. I feel both international and English-speaking users could benefit from this by being able to communicate with more people on twitter, and understand international tweets.