ProZ.com Translation Forums

Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator | Interesting, but...

Peter Motte — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 12:24:00 +0000

Forum: Machine Translation (MT)
Topic: Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator
Poster: Peter Motte
Post title: Interesting, but...

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]

Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator | Clarification: open the about page

ezpz — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:50:00 +0000

Forum: Machine Translation (MT)
Topic: Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator
Poster: ezpz
Post title: Clarification: open the about page

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.

Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator | Yes

Samuel Murray — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:45:00 +0000

Forum: Machine Translation (MT)
Topic: Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator
Poster: Samuel Murray
Post title: Yes

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.

Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator

ezpz — Fri, 18 Sep 2026 09:36:00 +0000

Forum: Machine Translation (MT)
Topic: Firefox has a free, fast, offline, machine translator
Poster: ezpz

[url removed]

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]