While the idea is great, and the extension is visually appealing, most of the features that will help people actually learn the language are not available for free. Furthermore, some heavy webpages become sluggish and unusable when they first load, and the extension uses flags to represent languages with no way to use alternative method such as ISO codes (this is bad because it reinforces the idea that a language 'belongs' to a country and a country has one national/native language, which endangers minority languages and plays a negative role in the loss of languages, among other reasons it is proscribed). Furthermore, the transliteration can be really inconsistent and sometimes even inaccurate. A single robust transliteration system should be used for all words in a language to avoid confusion.

Its a good idea, but at least for Japanese, its making word-for-word translations that are awkward or just don't fit in with the context with the rest of the sentence. e.g. "next week -> "next 週", "part of the beauty of the system is..." -> "part of 美しさ of the the system is...". It also changes things like URLs, which is a big nono for me.

Firefox keeps complaining that Toucan is slowing down page processing.

This is really a great extension. It allows you to stay immerged in a language at all time and discover new vocabulary in the things you're interested in since it translates words from what you're currently reading. It's especially good for beginners since it helps you recognize words in different context without reading full sentences in the language. Really looking forward to future updates :)

App incrivel

Thanks, this now helping me to translate words without go to google translator.

This extension is incredibly useful, the idea is just perfect !!
Please continue develop this extension !

This extension is incredibly useful whether you're a beginner who's just started on their language-learning journey, or a more advanced speaker who just wants to brush up on occasion, or build their vocab. What little correspondence I've had with the Toucan team so far has been wonderfully professional and polite, so you can trust that any issues you have on that front will be resolved (or try to be resolved) smoothly. It is limited in its language selection currently, which is unfortunate (I wanted to use it for Russian, but that's not ready just yet), but with constant additions and updates to the extension, I'm sure that more will be added in time.

by Michel G., QC, CA
Toucan makes it really easy for me to get started with Spanish. I get to build my vocabulary, hear correct pronunciation, and practice my accent. All this, while doing my usual reading routine. I've been using Firefox extensions for a long time and this one is the best because it opens up a whole new world to me.
I was told that new updates are coming and got the feeling that they're working really hard to improve the extension. Can't wait to see.

It's a very interesting idea for an extension and I'm glad it was made. As others have said, it does have performance issues. On a high performance desktop PC it's not terrible but the lag is still very noticeable.

Sometimes the replacements don't make logical sense in the context. Nouns are fine, and it mostly replaces nouns, but sometimes it replaces a verb and for example in German it will put the infinitive form of a reflexive verb in place of an English verb, so in the sentence "I can't afford it" you see "I can't [sich leisten] it", which doesn't make sense. But I suppose it'll never make sense putting directly translated foreign words into an English sentence. I still can hover over it and learn the word, and thus expand my vocabulary.

Sometimes it translates a word with the wrong translation for the sentence because a word exists in English with multiple meainings. For example, "harbour" as a verb is translated into the noun form, which no longer makes sense. Or for another example of a mistranslation, it translates "vitamin A defieniency" into "vitamin [a deficiency]" where the part in square brackets is in another language. This is because it thinks 'A' is the indefinite article, but it's the actual name and shouldn't be translated.

What would be really cool is if it could replace more of the words around the word, or even entire sentences. The way it currenly works can be confusing and it reduces readability to see a random noun in German but the connecting words and articles in English. My brain expects to see the other words in German as well if I'm reading German, and I'm worried I'm training my brain to confuse the languages.

It's especially confusing when a word exists in both languages but with different meanings. For "a disc jockey" it translates "a disc" literally and leaves the word jockey, which no longer makes sense. It should have been translated into a single word. "Box office" should be translated as one word "Kinokasse" but instead it leaves "box" and just translates "office" into "Büro" which is meaningless. A literal office in a box?

I suppose it might be too difficult to translate partial sentences and too difficult for learners to translate entire sentences. The dream would be a machine learning algorithm that knows what I know and replaces what it knows I will understand, so that over time I end up reading mostly German with only the occasional English word.

For now, I think this add-on will be good for improving my vocabulary via exposure to new words and regular practice that I otherwise wouldn't have, but it is not without problems. For me it's still useful enough to have enabled, just for the repeated exposure.

Great idea! Great way to learn new vocab on the go.

It's a simple but great concept, and it's showing results after only a couple of weeks.

The pause feature is also great for when you need to focus on important text without getting any foreign words.

I love the idea, but for me it slows down my browser so much that it is unusable, freezing my tab even on the lowest word amount setting. Will definitely come back and see if it works any better in the future

I actually came back to this and just stopped it running on the more taxing sites. Unfortunately these are the sites I use most, like twitch or any other chat room. But I can make some use of Toucan so i'll change my original 1 star rating to 3, hoping it runs more efficiently or has options to make it do so in the future