Mouseover the Moon

This is a website for English-language speakers with a basic, but not fluent, reading knowledge of any of Spanish, French, German, Italian, Russian, or Latin - and who want to improve their reading ability. The idea is to give you reading texts in your desired language with the pleasing property that hovering your mouse on any phrase gives an instant English translation. That way, you can read with enough speed to enjoy the text, don't miss the meaning, and learn new words. Or, you can switch instantly to the traditional bilingual, parallel columns, presentation. To get the idea, hover your mouse on the text under the buttons below. The highlighted titles are links to the books.

The translations are by AI language models as they exist in May, 2025, mostly Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, with a few chapters by OpenAI's GPT-4.1. These models produce roughly comparable results, with Claude perhaps a little better at following formatting instructions. Still, there are various glitches in punctuation and paragraph breaks, and the occasional weird or wrong translation. Forgive the flaws, have fun, and improve your language skills.

Click on one of these buttons to pick a language: