Do you happen to work in a place where restrictions are placed by your organization’s server on access to some pages on the web, even when such pages may have nothing particularly harmful in them? Does your employer’s filtering app block you from connecting, downloading documents, videos and other files from websites it perceives to be inappropriate? Then you may just be interested in this: such cyber barricades can be crossed using the springboard – Google Translate.
Contents
Google translate is one of Google’s proxy tools and, as a matter of fact, the most popular Google proxy. When you request for a web content using Google Translate as proxy, the content gets downloaded on Google servers and is then delivered to you. If the domains delivering the CSS files and the images are not restricted, the web pages usually appear exactly as the original.
We are going to describe two ways you can use Google translate as a proxy, and they are pretty simple.
Method 1
- You will first have to enter the URL below, without pressing Enter just yet:
https://translate.google.com/translate? - Next, specify the destination language (tl) and source language (sl). Your destination language should be the actual language of the web page. You can use any other language as source language. Again, do not click GO just yet.
- For this example, our destination language is English (en) and source language is Japanese (ja):
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja&tl=en - Now, add the URL of the site you wish to visit. For this example, we use thesitename.com. Use the format shown below:
https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=ja$tl=en&u=http://thesitename.com/ - Press Enter or click Go. You should now be served your web pages.
Another way to do this is to use “langpair” (you can guess that stands for language pair) to specify both the source language and the destination language all at once.
Method 2
If you think you can’t always remember all the codes you must include in the URL and their order, or if coding isn’t just your thing, then you will find this method useful. You will, however, still have to key in the URLs for Google Translate and the site you want to see. That shouldn’t be a strange experience to you. So if you are ready, let’s begin:
- To go to Google Translate, enter the URL below on your browser:
http://www.google.com/translate - Now feed in the URL of the website you want to visit:
http://thesitename.com/ - Google Translate actually provides you with the option of translating the language of the website to other languages. So you can translate the language of a web page from English to French, Spanish, or Japanese. If you wish to change the language, specify your preferred language on the top right corner of the page. On the other hand, if your aim is to stay on the language of the web page, then select the radio button named Original.
Using Google Translate proxy can be made even easier. If you are using Firefox browser, you can create a bookmarklet with Javascript. Use the following code to create your bookmarklet:
javascript:(function(){var%20g=\’http://www.google.com/translate hl=en&sl=en&tl=es&anno=2&u=\’;var%20a=prompt(\’Which%20URL?\’);if(a){document.location.href=g+encodeURIComponent(a);}})();
On your bookmark toolbar, create a new bookmark. Next, paste the bookmarklet Javascript code in the field Location and give it a name. A click on the bookmark will give you a prompt to enter the URL of the site you wish to visit.
Warning: Not an absolute proxy
When you request content via Google Translate, most of the scripts will be delivered through Google Translate server, but some style and scripts will go through the original website. The implication is that you are not guaranteed an absolute solution to bypassing any form of filtering. So even while trying to use the proxy, it would be wise to choose the contents you are requesting for, since some may still be brought to the attention of your administrators.
