Habits the browser taught you · habit 07 of 40

Translating the page

A bar appears offering to translate this page, or you right click and ask for it. It is one of the most quietly useful things a browser does and it works well enough that people stopped thinking about it.

The habit

You accept the translate offer, or ask for it from the menu, because a page you cannot read is a page you cannot use.

Why it is automatic

The offer is unprompted, which is most of why it gets accepted. Nobody goes looking for translation. A bar appears the moment a page in another language loads, at the exact moment of confusion, and it proposes the obvious solution. Accepting is the path of least resistance and it has always worked.

It is also invisible in operation. The page reloads looking mostly the same with different words in it, so it presents as a rendering change rather than as a network request. Almost nothing in the interface suggests the text went anywhere, and there is no reason a reader would assume it had.

The underlying need is real as well, and this is the part worth saying plainly. Markets, forums and support pages are frequently not in the reader's first language. The choice is often between reading a translation and not reading at all, so refusing to translate is not a small ask.

What it actually does here

The mechanism to understand is that translation is generally a service and not a local capability. To translate, the text has to reach a translator. On most builds that means the page content, or the parts of it being displayed, are sent to a provider over the ordinary connection, and the translated text is sent back.

That is why this feature is different from everything else in this section. The other habits leave records on disk or make a request you were going to make anyway. This one takes content that arrived one way and sends it out by another, without presenting itself as doing so, and it does that with whatever account and connection the browser has.

Translation extensions behave the same way as the built in feature and sometimes more broadly, because an extension able to translate a page is by definition able to read every page. It can be configured to translate automatically, which turns a deliberate act into a standing one. What that means for add ons generally is covered in making the browser comfortable.

The offer is also easy to accept accidentally. The bar appears at the top of the window, near the controls people use constantly, and it appears while the page is still settling. A stray click on a bar that was not read is a common way this happens, and there is usually no confirmation afterwards.

What a translation request carries

The useful mental model is that translation is a conversation with a third party about the page you are reading. What that conversation contains varies by build and by provider, but the general shape does not, and the shape is what matters for the decision.

• The text on screen, which is the part being translated and therefore the part that has to be sent.
• The language pair, which says both what the page is and what you read.
• The ordinary connection details that come with any request made outside your other setup.
• Whatever account the browser or the extension is signed into, if any.

The version of this that is fine

None of this means reading in a second language is a lost cause. It means the translating should happen away from the page rather than to it. Copying a short phrase into a translator on a different machine, or looking up the handful of words that actually block comprehension, gets most of the benefit without sending the page anywhere.

It is also worth knowing that the vocabulary involved is small and repetitive. The words that appear on order screens, dispute forms and status labels are the same words every time, so a short written list built once does more for a reader than a translation button pressed daily.

What to do instead

The aim is to keep the reading and the translating in separate places, and to make sure the browser is never doing it on its own initiative.

1. Turn off the offer to translate pages in settings, so the bar never appears at the moment of least attention.
2. Install no translation extension on the browser used for this, and check that an existing one is not set to run automatically.
3. Translate individual words or phrases on a different device rather than translating the page you are on.
4. Write out a short list of the terms you keep needing, once, on paper, and use it instead of translating repeatedly.
5. If a translate bar appears, dismiss it rather than clicking through it, and check afterwards that it has not been set to always translate that language.

How to notice you did it anyway

This one leaves less on disk than the others, so the check is about settings and about what the browser did while you were not reading it.

• Open the language settings and look for any language marked as always translate, which is set by a single click on the bar.
• Check the extensions list for anything that offers translation, including tools whose main purpose is something else.
• Watch what the browser does on the next page in another language, since the offer appearing at all means the feature is on.
• If the browser is signed into an account, look at whether translation activity is recorded there.
• Confirm the page in front of you is the original rather than a translated copy, which is not always obvious after the first second.

What readers ask about this habit