Which website trans­la­tors are the best?

To translate web pages, you can use tools like Google Translate or rely on the in­te­grat­ed language trans­la­tion in browsers like Chrome, Firefox, Edge, or Safari. This lets you au­to­mat­i­cal­ly translate web pages and even use trans­la­tions for your own page.

The Internet sometimes feels like a ride on the subway, where we encounter many other languages besides our own. Since we don’t know all of them, website trans­la­tion tools come in handy. Trans­la­tion tools are also great if you want to optimize your mul­ti­lin­gual website for search engines and make it ac­ces­si­ble to a wider audience.

If you come across pages online with in­ter­est­ing content but in a language you don’t speak, popular browsers offer built-in features that allow you to translate a web page. Here’s how it works.

By default, trans­lat­ing a Google Chrome page is done via the address bar. Open the page you want to translate and click on the Google Translate icon at the top right. The menu to translate the page will now open. Google lets you translate the page into your preferred language or into a selected language. Al­ter­na­tive­ly, you can right-click on a page and select “Translate this page” from the menu.

When you choose your preferred languages, you can enable or disable automatic trans­la­tions. If you don’t see the icon in the address bar, go to your Chrome settings and then “Languages”. Here, you can not only change your Chrome language, but also choose to activate automatic trans­la­tions of entire foreign-language pages. To do this, activate “Offer to translate pages that aren’t in a language you read”. Automatic trans­la­tions can be de­ac­ti­vat­ed at any time.

Firefox un­for­tu­nate­ly doesn’t have a built-in page trans­la­tor. To translate a page, you’ll first need to add a language extension to the browser, like To Google Translate. To add it, go to the settings via the three-dash menu in the upper right corner and then to “Add-ons and themes”. You can also open the add-ons manager with the shortcut [Ctrl] + [Shift] + [A]. Select a trans­la­tion extension like Google Translate, click “Add to Firefox”, and choose whether you want the add-on to translate all unknown languages au­to­mat­i­cal­ly.

When you now open a foreign-language page in Firefox, right-click on the page and click “Translate this page”. If you want to change your browser language, simply go to “Settings” to change your Firefox language.

Just like Google Chrome, Microsoft’s Edge browser has an automatic trans­la­tion feature. It’s activated by default for unknown languages and sits in the upper-right corner of the address bar. Click on the trans­la­tor icon and select “Translate” to pick your target language. In the browser settings, you can specify whether the Edge browser should always translate pages in a certain language or whether select languages should still be legible.

Safari has a built-in trans­la­tion feature that springs into action when a web page needs to be trans­lat­ed. You can recognize the feature by the “Translate” button in the Smart Search field. Click the button to translate a page into a target language.

You may not know that Microsoft Word offers a built-in feature to translate entire documents or text segments. To use this, you don’t even need to change the Word language or the Windows 10 language. In the document you want to translate, simply go to the “Review” tab and hit “Translate”. Here you have the choice between “Translate Selection” and “Translate Document”.

Go to “Translate Document” to translate the entire document into another language. The trans­la­tor menu will open on the right, where you can choose your target language and save a trans­lat­ed copy of the document. If you want to translate a web page, simply copy the text into a Word document. Or, if you want to translate your website without hiring a pro­fes­sion­al trans­la­tor, you can use Word and change the Windows 10 keyboard language, to avoid punc­tu­a­tion errors with editor and spell checker.

Google Translate is one of the most popular and widely used trans­la­tion tools. You can use it either within the Google Chrome browser or install it on mobile devices as an app. Currently (February 2022), Google Translate can translate 133 languages and optimizes trans­la­tion quality through the Google Neural Machine Trans­la­tion system (GNMT). This uses machine learning, ar­ti­fi­cial in­tel­li­gence and neural networks, to con­stant­ly improve the quality of trans­la­tions.

If you want Google Translate to translate entire web pages, simply open Google Translate and enter the page URL on the left. Google Translate will then display a hyperlink to the trans­lat­ed version in the target language field. You can also use the “Website” button to search for website trans­la­tions. In case you’re not a fan of Google, there are many powerful Google Translate al­ter­na­tives out there, like Reverso, Microsoft Trans­la­tor, und Linguee.

Pages can also be trans­lat­ed easily on mobile devices with Android or iOS. Since Android uses the Chrome browser by default, Google Translate is available here. On iOS, Safari has its own page trans­la­tor.

Android: Automatic trans­la­tion of pages in other languages is enabled by default in the Android app of the Chrome browser. If the feature doesn’t appear au­to­mat­i­cal­ly at the bottom of the window, go to the three-dot icon and choose “Translate...”. Or go to “Settings” > “Language” under trans­la­tion settings.

iOS: On your iPhone, you can translate foreign language pages with Safari. To do this, tap the “aA” button at the top of the page’s address bar. In the menu that opens, go to “Translate to (preferred language)”.

You can also find ad­di­tion­al trans­la­tion apps on either operating system, which you can download either via the Google Play Store or the App Store.