Google was first spotted working on the new “partial translate” feature for its browser in March of this year. Code commits on Chromium Gerrit suggested the development. As of last week, the company seems to have made some progress on this feature. Reddit user Leopeva64 recently discovered that the new Chrome feature is now available in the Canary channel, though it’s not yet fully functional (via). The translate button found in the Omnibox (address/search bar) will let you translate any selected text on the page. You can also right-click on the selected text and select the “Translate to…” option. The “bubble” UI that shows the translated text also contains a button to “Translate full page.” The actual translation doesn’t work currently, not in the Canary version either. The buttons are there and they do trigger the translate pop-up. However, the selected text isn’t translated. However, it’s clear what Google is doing here. The current implementation of the translate feature on Google Chrome works quite efficiently too. You can quickly have a webpage translated to your desired language with the click of a button. But its all-or-nothing approach may be annoying when a page only has certain portions in a foreign language. You cannot translate just that part. Google is finally addressing this limitation.
Some Google Chrome alternatives already have this ability
Google Chrome is the world’s most popular web browser, largely thanks to it coming pre-installed and default on most Android devices. It is quite feature-rich as well. However, there are certain highly useful features that you can find on other browsers but not on Chrome. The ability to partially translate a webpage is one such feature. The privacy-focused Vivaldi browser recently added this feature, while Microsoft’s Edge browser has had it for some time now. The latter’s implementation is better too. Instead of a separate pop-up, it simply replaces the selected text on the page itself. This makes for a more seamless reading experience. Nonetheless, Google Chrome is just starting to develop this feature. Things may change by the time it’s ready to let everyone translate selected text on a webpage. We will keep a close eye on this development and let you know as and when we have more information.
