Firefox Translate is a built-in translation feature of the Firefox web browser that is special. It is special, because its translation engine runs locally. That’s great for privacy, as no translation service needs to be contacted on the Internet with information on the site you visited or the content that you want translated.
The main downside to Firefox Translate is that it supports fewer languages. One of the main shortcomings was missing support for the languages Japanese, Chinese, and Korean.
Good news is, that Mozilla has added support for the three languages to Firefox Nightly. In other words: you can now translate webpages that are in Chinese, Japanese, or Korean using Firefox’s built-in translation feature. Yes, that works offline as well.
Once you have installed the latest Firefox Nightly version, you have these languages at your disposal. Note that you need to download language packs for these languages in the settings before you can get started.
Here is how that is done:
- Load about:preferences in the Firefox address bar or select Menu > Preferences.
- Scroll down to Translations on the page.
- Select the Download button next to any language that you want to translate using Firefox.
The languages become available immediately after the downloads complete.
Firefox may either suggest to translate a webpage when it is opened, or you may select the translate icon in the address bar to display the translate interface.
Hit the translate button to translate the webpage to the selected language. A click on the translate settings icon displays the usual options. These include never translate a specific language or always translate it.
Closing Words
It will take some time before support for the new languages arrives in Firefox Stable. Still, the integration is a major milestone for Mozilla and part of the Firefox user base.
While there is still work to be done, as major languages are still unsupported, translate functionality is a major win for users of the Firefox web browser.
Have you tried Firefox’s translate functionality? What is your take on it? Feel free to leave a comment down below.
I haven’t tried Firefox’s translate functionality and not even sure of its availability and development on the Firefox 115 ESR branch (115.18.0 here).
To translate quickly a paragraph I use either of the two :
– SimplyTranslate which proxies the quest to translation engines.
– Kagi Translate, because it’s limit is 20,000 characters whilst DeepPro without registration is 2,000 I think.
To translate in-content a whole page I use the Firefox ‘TWP – Translate Web Pages’ which requires a connection to translate.googleapis.com which I’ve included in the very few system-wide non-blocked Google servers here.
Languages I most often encounter which I need to translate are German, Chinese, Japanese. I very seldom encounter pages written in Sanskrit 🙂
@ Tom Hawack,
Yes, I use TWP on the same version of FF as you do, but you can switch the translator to Bing, Yandex or DeepL in the Addon’s settings (click the hamburger to access “Translations” choices).