Right-click Translate Language

🍎 Before you begin this tutorial, make sure you've completed the Developer Quick Start Guide.

In this tutorial, you'll build a mod that translates the language of text you highlight.

You’ll build the mod on this page: la Repubblica (an Italian newspaper)

1. Open the Page Editor

Start by navigating your browser to la Repubblica. Then, open the PixieBrix Page Editor.

Grant PixieBrix Access to the Page

PixieBrix does not have access to any of the web pages you view by default.

Therefore, the first time you open the Page Editor on any new webpage, you need to grant PixieBrix access to the page.

You can grant access by clicking Enable PixieBrix on [Webpage] in the Page Editor:

2. Add a Context Menu

Click New Mod in the top left of the Page Editor and choose Context Menu

Give your action a Name

In the Brick Configuration Panel, change the Name to “Quick Start Guide”.

Then, in the Mods Panel, click save icon:

Clicking the Save icon will bring up a modal for Packaging a Mod. Set an alias (like a username) if you haven't already and give the mod a unique ID and description, then click Create.

Configure the Menu Item Title

In the brick configuration Title input, replace Context Menu Item with Translate: %s

💡The "%s" placeholder configure the caption so that it dynamically changes based on the text you highlight. Note this convention is different than the mustache braces {{ used in other places in PixieBrix. It's because for context menu items, Chrome is filling in the selected text, not PixieBrix.

To test your context menu configuration:

Highlight oro e record del mondo nei 400 ostacoli on the webpage
Right-click to expand the context menu. It should look like this; do not click it yet - as nothing will happen until we add more bricks.

Configure where the Context Menu Appears

In the Sites field, click All URLs. This tells PixieBrix to show the context menu item on any webpage you visit.
You can remove the match pattern configuration that defaulted to https://www.repubblica.it/* given it’s included in All URLs. Do this by clicking the ABC entry mode dropdown and choosing Remove

Automatic Permissions

💡When creating a Context Menu, configuring Automatic Permissions grants PixieBrix access to pages without you first clicking the context menu. For context menus, this helps ensure PixieBrix knows which text you have selected

Scroll down to the Advanced configuration. In the Automatic Permissions section, click All URLs
Once again, remove the match pattern configuration that defaulted to https://www.repubblica.it/* as you did above

The Page Editor Configuration should now look like this:

👏👏👏 Nice job! You’ve configured your first context menu! Let’s keep going…

3. Add the Google Translate API Integration

Add the Integration

We'll first need to add the Translate brick. Click the "Add Button"

Search "translate" and +Add the Translate brick

Choose the Integration Configuration

In the Integration dropdown, choose "Google Translate (RapidAPI) - ✨ Built-In"

💡Integrations can have multiple configurations (e.g., because you have multiple accounts with the service). The integration dropdown lets you choose the appropriate configuration for a given a given actions or enhancement.

Learn more about Configuring Integrations.

Configure the Brick Inputs

You build mods by composing bricks, adding one brick after another to create the desired workflow.

Each brick passes information to the next brick. In other words, an “Output” from the proceeding brick can be referenced as as the “Input” to a subsequent brick.

The Data Panel

To understand this concept, it’s helpful to become familiar with the Data Panel. The Data Panel is on the right-hand side of the Page Editor.

By default, the Data Panel is blank. To populate it, you’ll need to run your context menu.
You can run the context menu by highlighting any text on the webpage, such as "oro e record del mondo nei 400 ostacoli," right-click, and then click the PixieBrix context menu action.
Now the Data Panel’s tabs are populated with information to help you configure the brick

Use the Context tab to view available brick inputs

You can use the Data Panel’s Context tab to show the available inputs for the brick.
Click the Context tab, and you should see two input keys:

Click the @input key to see all the available values.

Use selectionText to configure the query input

For this tutorial, you’ll use selectionText, which contains the text you highlighted. Scroll down to find it:

Click the page icon next to selectionText to copy its property path to your clipboard: @input.selectionText

💡Notice the “@” in @input.selectionText. In PixieBrix, the “@” denotes a variable. Therefore, @input.selectionText is a variable whose value will change dynamically based on the text you highlight.

Configure the “target” language

The "source" and "target" fields represent the source and target languages for the translation. If you leave the "source" field blank, the API will try to detect it.
For this tutorial, I'll leave the "source" field blank, and change the target to "en" which is the two-letter abbreviation for English.
Click Save.

💡Here's Wikipedia's list of two letter language abbreviations: List of ISO 639-1 codes

Test the Google Translate API integration

Highlight any text on the web page, such as "oro e record del mondo nei 400 ostacoli," right-click, and then click the PixieBrix context menu action.
The Data Panel will refresh. Navigate to its Output tab, and you should see that your highlighted text has been translated to English

4. Display the Translation in a Window Alert

Add the Window Alert brick

Let’s display the translated text in a Window Alert.
Click Add Brick, search "window alert" and +Add it

Configure the Window Alert

Once again, execute the mod to populate the Data Panel
Go to the Context tab, and click the @transformed key to expand it
Click the page icon next to translatedText to copy its property path to your clipboard: @transformed.translatedText (Look familiar? We just saw this when viewing the brick output in the prior step)