Enable Firefox Translation Locally to Translate Web Pages

2 min


You can natively get the Firefox Translation feature – right at the browser window. You can easily translate it into English and other available languages. Here’s how.

Firefox Translation is part of Project Bergamot, which was launched in 2019. It comes as a Firefox official extension. The entire translation happens locally in your system, unlike Google Chrome’s translation feature.

For example, Google Chrome uses Google’s own Translate engine, and it happens on the cloud. Which obviously transmits your data to Google servers.

In contrast, this native Firefox translation happens locally in your browser, keeping your data safe. And you can safely translate foreign languages into English or any other available language.

How to Enable Firefox Translation (All versions)

Open the official Mozilla extension page for “Firefox Translation” using the following link.

Click on “Add to Firefox” and click “Add” on the confirmation dialog.

Add the extension to Firefox
Add the extension to Firefox

Wait for the installation to finish. If successful, you should see a toolbar icon for the translation extension.

How to Use

The translation works in two ways.

First, if you visit any other language page which is different than your default browser language, Firefox should show you an automatic popup for translation by detecting the language. See the below image.

You can click Translate, and you are done. In addition, you can also tweak several options, as shown in the below image.

Automatic Translation in Firefox
Automatic Translation in Firefox

Second, you can also see a toolbar icon for this extension. If some web pages are not showing popups, you can click on this icon and select the source and target language from the list. Then manually translate.

Additional settings you can find by visiting about:addons from the address bar. And then, find the settings under these extensions. It also contains details about privacy and data-related items.

Supported Languages

As of publishing this, the extension supports the following languages:

  • Spanish
  • Estonian
  • English
  • German
  • Czech
  • Bulgarian
  • Portuguese
  • Italian
  • French
  • Polish

And the following language support is currently under development.

  • Russian
  • Persian (Farsi)
  • Icelandic
  • Norwegian Nynorsk
  • Norwegian Bokmål
  • Ukrainian
  • Dutch

Wrapping Up

We hope more language feature land will eventually be available for all languages. The translation is so much important due to the growing number of non-English webpages containing valuable information. It helps to communicate and benefits users. Not to mention privacy-related concerns in other browser translation features where the data is transmitted to the cloud for conversions.

I believe it’s one of the underrated extensions of Firefox, and hopefully, this article will raise awareness.

Some references from Mozilla blog.


Arindam

Creator and author of debugpoint.com. Connect with me via Telegram, 𝕏 (Twitter), or send us an email.
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