An Opera extension for the multilingual Web

One of the most popular Opera extensions is Translate, which translates a page using an automatic service. But some pages have already been translated, and checked for quality manually. HTML has provided markup to make this clear (rel="alternate" hreflang="xx" as attributes to a link) for more than a decade, but this has not been implemented in browsers, which makes it hard for users to discover.

The new Opera extension Swaplang, developed specifically for the MLW project, is an example of how a browser might natively implement this functionality. If a page uses the proper HTML markup, it shows that there are alternatives available and lets you select between them. To try it, go to the Swaplang download page with Opera 11 (or higher) and install it

If you need a test page, try Character Encodings.

The extension is still in development, with some enhancements expected. The source code is available under the Apache 2.0 open source license, in case you would rather take it in your own directions…