With a smart combination of contributed translations, and a Mozilla Firefox extension, Japanese users can now easily translate non-Japanese sites into their own language, and enjoy the results in real time. This is made possible by a free service called Japanize being developed by Cybozu Labs, a company dedicated to the research of information sharing technologies.

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Japanize works by using a combination of translations uploaded by contributors (see the Bebits.com translation file), and an easy to install Firefox extension. After you install the Firefox extension, you just visit any of the translated sites, and the content will be automatically translated on the fly and displayed in Japanese. It is like a locale kit for the web.

While this service may not be suited for highly dynamic content, I can think of many situations where it could be very useful to make sites that would otherwise be out of reach more accessible to Japanese users. For example, a member of the Japanese community by the name of Sena has started "Japanizing" Bebits.com, as you can see in the screenshot below.

Another useful application would be to use it to make the Haiku Icon Contest rating page more accessible to our friends in Japan. With a little creativity, you can out a smart system to work in many smart ways, don't you think? ;-)