This is the third article in my 21 day blogging marathon. It is not quite as polished, as it could be.

Join the marathon by adding meaningful comments all the way!

I got myself a Mercury MW3030R router from China a couple of weeks ago. It’s a dual band router, which can actually reach speeds of 300Mbs over the 5Ghz. It was so  cheap I didn’t bother looking too deep into the specifications. It turned out, the router only supports Chinese language. It also turned out, there is no option to either flash a new firmware, without doing some soldering, and firmware digging. I’m not really good with hardware, and it didn’t want to waste time which would almost certainly result in a battered, smoking bricked device.

I had to find a way to do the configuration, without having to learn Chinese first.

The obvious solution is to make Chrome translate the page automatically with Google translate. Sadly the UI is written in some Javascript post processing, and Google translate can’t get a single character translated.

I could configure the router, by manually selecting random values, and translating it in another window through the online translation service.

After I had to do some minor configuration changes, my eyes were watering, so I had to find another way of doing this.

Fortunately there is a Chrome add-on Tapermonkey, that enables to run Javascripts upon rendering a webpage. Also I found a script that was created for a similar purpose, for a TP-Link router.

Most of the translation was already good, as the TP-Link and Mercury brands are quite similar. The script itself however had a couple of glitches. First of all it replaced the HTML content instead of updating it, so you lost any previously set values in input fields. It didn’t consider replacement order, so you ended up with partially translated sentences all  the time.

Just after a few modifications I came up with a  new version of the script, now available here.  Some new strings were added, and now translation is about 90% complete. It’s good enough already to be used for day-to day reconfiguration. Now I can configure this beast properly, and I can put my sledgehammer back to the garage.