I-Firefox Community Forum

I don't know why, but when I browse pages in English, the context menu offers to "translate selection into Hebrew". This is weird and totally unwanted. I don't know how FF decided that I need translations, and specifically to Hebrew!

In the settings, my preferred language is "English (US)". In "translation settings", the list of "Translation will happen automatically for the following languages" is empty, and the list of "Translation will not be offered for the following languages" has Hebrew and French. (I would add English but I don't see how.)

Is there a way to just remove this translation option from the context menu?

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

I am using Firefox 128.5.0esr (64-bit) on Debian 12. This is the browser that comes installed with the system. Recently, an offline translation feature was added to Firefox. In settings, you can download various languages. I would like to know where language models for offline translation are stored. The downloaded languages I want to copy to another computer without internet connection so that I can use the offline translation on this computer.

As far as I can tell from reading the help pages, the Firefox translation feature should automatically translate any page in any available language, unless explicitly set not to do so. However, I observe that no translation occurs unless I first select text, right click, and select translate, and even then, the translation is presented as unformatted text in a separate dialog box, which is not much better than copying and pasting web pages into some other translator service. Am I missing something here?

Sadly, this is not even close to being competitive with the Google Translate level of functionality. I use Google Translate every day to read package labels in grocery stores, road signs, and a host of other written sources of information. Occasionally, I even use it to hold conversations with people I would not otherwise be able to talk to. So far, I am nearly monolingual, and I am unwilling to do without this; I probably wouldn't travel if it were not available. It does tie me to that fraction of the surface area of the earth where high speed internet access is generally available, but I don't really need to go any places where it is not; I am not trying to hike across Antarctica. I understand that there is a loss of privacy when dealing with Google, but I do whatever I can to fend that off, and the value of the free services I receive in exchange is huge. What's the future of Firefox in this respect?