Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator Inițiatorul discuției: ezpz
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ezpz 
Local time: 23:13
Membru (2009)
din engleză în spaniolă
+ ...
https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260912-firefox-translations/
On the address bar, enter:
about:translations
You will see a form similar to Google Translate, DeepL, etc.
It runs locally on your machine, and therefore it also runs offline.
Obviously it's free, as well as open-source.
For those of us that don't use onl... See more https://gigazine.net/gsc_news/en/20260912-firefox-translations/
On the address bar, enter:
about:translations
You will see a form similar to Google Translate, DeepL, etc.
It runs locally on your machine, and therefore it also runs offline.
Obviously it's free, as well as open-source.
For those of us that don't use online Machine Translators due to privacy concerns, and don't have computers fast enough to run OpusCatMT or the newfangled LLMs, this is a very good option for quick, basic MT that you can copy-paste into your CAT/Word-processor and speed up your translation work process without an internet connection.
To download the language packs, open Settings, General, scroll down to Translations, download both languages you want to translate FROM and also TO.
(I think it uses English as the "Rosetta stone", so translations between language pairs not involving English are markedly lower quality). (Still this is incredibly useful even if just for type-setting, number formatting, and copy-pasting without formatting).
[Edited at 2026-09-18 09:39 GMT] ▲ Collapse
| | | | Samuel Murray
Ţările de Jos
Local time: 00:13
Membru (2006)
din engleză în afrikaans
+ ...
This feature has existed for a number of years now. The translation quality is adequate for making sense of what a website says. It's a bit of an odd thing, though: the machine translator runs entirely offline but it translates web pages. I think this may be useful for intranets.
| | | | ezpz
Local time: 23:13
Membru (2009)
din engleză în spaniolă
+ ...
INIŢIATORUL SUBIECTULUI | Clarification: open the about page | Sep 18 |
I am aware of the webpage translation feature.
I was pointing specifically to this about page:
about:translations
There were convoluted ways to try and use it as a Google-Translate-like machine translator, e.g. by making a a Html file with your source text, dragging-dropping into Firefox and using the "translate webpage" feature (like an Intranet as you said).
Now you can forget all of that.
Open the above about page and you can simply copy-past... See more I am aware of the webpage translation feature.
I was pointing specifically to this about page:
about:translations
There were convoluted ways to try and use it as a Google-Translate-like machine translator, e.g. by making a a Html file with your source text, dragging-dropping into Firefox and using the "translate webpage" feature (like an Intranet as you said).
Now you can forget all of that.
Open the above about page and you can simply copy-paste your source-text to get an instant machine translation. ▲ Collapse
| | | | Peter Motte
Belgia
Local time: 00:13
Membru (2009)
din olandeză în flamandă
+ ...
| Interesting, but... | Sep 18 |
It's interesting but the question remains how trustworthy it is, and how sure you can be it's correct translated if you don't know the source text or the target text?
That's always the problem with automated systems: they demand a high level of expertise from the user.
[Edited at 2026-09-18 12:24 GMT]
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ezpz
Local time: 23:13
Membru (2009)
din engleză în spaniolă
+ ...
INIŢIATORUL SUBIECTULUI | Privacy and Ownership | 11:06 |
Yes Peter, that has always been the case.
Even as machine-translators get better, there will always be the risk of misuse by people who know nothing about the language they are translating from or to (or both?!), who will not be able to tell whether the output is correct or incorrect.
Perhaps it's made worse recently by lofty, ultra-confident claims from AI-companies/Tech-Bros/Shareholders that the output is always flawless -- until it isn't, and they'll add a 6point, light-grey, bot... See more Yes Peter, that has always been the case.
Even as machine-translators get better, there will always be the risk of misuse by people who know nothing about the language they are translating from or to (or both?!), who will not be able to tell whether the output is correct or incorrect.
Perhaps it's made worse recently by lofty, ultra-confident claims from AI-companies/Tech-Bros/Shareholders that the output is always flawless -- until it isn't, and they'll add a 6point, light-grey, bottom-left corner disclaimer "AI can make mistakes".
If we are currently living this dust-bowl of job posts on ProZ it is because so many would-be clients are taking their chances on "good enough" machine-translation -- without a clue whether it actually is good enough, until they are faced with a lawsuit for damages from false, incorrect or harmful information.
The place of a translator cannot be replaced by a guessing-machine, no matter how advanced.
If you do not know the language, but you want to communicate in that language to reach people who cannot understand your own language, you need a person of confidence who will transmit your message correctly without errors; and this person needs education and experience to be considered of sufficient skill to handle important tasks in exchange for money.
The point of using a machine-translator, as a (*ugh I hate this word*) "tool" on your belt, is to help in your work, not replace it - by providing a basic scaffolding, ensuring completeness, better spell-checking, etc.
The point of this post is that now there is one you can download that is both private and fully yours to keep and use as much or as little as you want, and that it will run on your good old Lenovo laptop from 2014.
- There is no risk of compromising your client's data, and then getting yourself in hot water.
- There will not be Captcha's you have to keep clicking for minutes for a tech-goliath to decide whether you're a bot and/or that your browser-data is of value to sell to their advertising-partners.
- And it will run on a dual-core processor with 4GB of Ram without having to close Trados, Word or GoldenDict; (possibly Teams, but that program is just cancer).
You open a tab, get an answer, end of mission.
It's not good at all for long sentences, for technical jargon, for idiomatic expressions, for metaphors, etc.
And like I said, if you're translating neither to nor from English, any output is markedly low quality.
However, it is pretty excellent as a basic multi-word dictionary - who can remember the names of every food, item of clothing, piece of furniture in all of their languages?!
With the included browser spell-checker, you also catch the stupidest but most frequent mistakes - without needing a CAT tool, with a hundred buttons of every colour of the rainbow.
It will not replace properly maintained translation-memories, nor domain-specific glossaries, and it will certainly not be able to replace the actual ability to speak/read/write a language to perform the work of delivering accurate and reliable translations ready for publishing.
But it is helpful.
And it's free. ▲ Collapse
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