You may soon translate text bits in Vivaldi Browser

[harlan4096]

Vivaldi Technologies introduced translate functionality in Vivaldi 4.0, released in June 2021. Soon, Vivaldi users will be able to translate selected text on any webpage they visit.

Vivaldi's translate feature does not rely on Google Translate, Bing Translate or other major translation services, but on a self-hosted instance of Lingvanex to make sure that user privacy is preserved while using the browser's translation feature.

The page translation feature is available already, and Vivaldi may offer to translate non-system language pages automatically on visit. You get the usual options to set up languages so that they are translated automatically.

Vivaldi does not support selection-based translating up until now; this changes in the next stable version of the Vivaldi browser, as the translation of selections becomes available in that version.
 
The translation feature works similarly to that in other browsers. Select text on a webpage, right-click on the selection and pick translate selection from the menu.
Vivaldi opens an overlay on the page that displays the selection in the detected language and translated to the system language.
 
You may change the source and destination language for the translation using the menu, e.g. change the language Vivaldi Browser translated the text to, to a non-system language.

A click on the close icon or a click anywhere else on the page closes the translation overlay again.

A keyboard shortcut is not set by default, but since you can map nearly any function in Vivaldi with keyboard shortcuts, you can do so for the translate feature as well.

Just select Vivaldi Menu > Tools > Settings, switch to the Keyboard settings menu when the Preferences open, open the Page section and scroll down to the "Translate Selected Text" field. Activate the field and add the desired keyboard combination to the field.
 
You may use the newly mapped keyboard shortcut from that moment on to translate text in the Vivaldi web browser.

Closing Words

Text-based translation is a missing feature of current versions of Vivaldi. The introduction of the feature in the next stable release of the browser improves the translation feature significantly; an option to translate typed text could be useful as well, but is missing at the time of writing.

You can check out the full changelog of the latest Vivaldi snapshot release here.

Now You: does your browser of choice support translate functionality? Do you use it?
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