I-Firefox Community Forum

Is there a setting to always show the translation icon in the Firefox desktop address bar?

1. Scenario

I'm visiting a website that is not in my native language. For example, I natively speak English, and the website contains Spanish text.

The Spanish website incorrectly sets lang="en" in the HTML. Here's an example: https://animalessinhogar.com.uy/

My browser's default language is set to US English. When Firefox sees the Spanish webpage declaring the lang="en" tag, it assumes the webpage is in English, and hides the translation icon from the address bar.

1. Issue

The end result is I see this website in Spanish, there's no translation icon in the address bar, and also no way to force a full page translation. The best I can do is select parts of the text, right click, and ask for "Translation Selection to English". This gets very tedious, especially when I have automatic translations for Spanish websites already turned on (browser.translations.alwaysTranslateLanguages = es).

1. Proposed solution

To work around these websites which mis-declare their language, is there a way to always show the translation icon in the address bar?

I had also thought of removing my browser's default language, so that the translation icon would always appear on every webpage. However, that would mean that websites that present different versions based on browser language wouldn't display my native language at first, or might not work at all? So this seems like a less good solution.

1. Firefox details

140.4.0esr (64-bit) running on Debian Linux 13 (Trixie)

Here's some related Firefox config options for translations, and their settings on my browser. I think I've only changed the configuration option to always translate Spanish webpages.

browser.translation.neverForLanguages browser.translations.alwaysTranslateLanguages es browser.translations.automaticallyPopup true browser.translations.chaos.errors false browser.translations.chaos.timeoutMS 0 browser.translations.enable true browser.translations.logLevel Error browser.translations.mostRecentTargetLanguages en browser.translations.neverTranslateLanguages browser.translations.newSettingsUI.enable false browser.translations.panelShown true browser.translations.select.enable true browser.translations.simulateUnsupportedEngine false browser.translations.useHTML false browser.translations.useLexicalShortlist false gfx.canvas.remote.use-canvas-translator-event true services.settings.main.translations-models.last_check 1773722950 services.settings.main.translations-wasm.last_check 1773722950 toolkit.telemetry.translations.logLevel Error

For example, the word thema, is exclusively capitalized in German, and it shows as error indeed when lowercase, but the capitalized one is not offered in the options. Why is that and how to fix it?

Also, is there a way to autocorrect capitalization for example?

I was previously successfully using the translate selection with the translate dialog automatically detecting the language of the selected text. Then, with that dialog open, I tried changing the from/to language - you know, just messing around - and now it refuses to automatically detect the language. It is now stuck on Tranlate to French. I've checked my settings page and my default language is English. Where is it getting the idea I'm French? Annoying af.

How can I get the automatic language selection to English as it previously was?

NOTE: As I was composing this request, I visited the Amazon store - as that's where I use the feature most - and noticed it's probably the tool itself that's broken recently as it was getting it right all the time before but now it's hit or miss. Again, annoying af especially because I've come to rely on this a lot. Please fix.