Being able to translate a page even if it is in my language

[Rachot]

The translator only lets me translate pages when it detects that it is not in my language, but some pages may have content in other languages such as Twitter or Reddit.

[Pesala]

@Rachot Try selecting the text, then translate from the context menu or in the Translate Panel.

[Rachot]

@Pesala I mean something like this

Original

Translated with an extension

[Pesala]

@Rachot Yes, I know what you mean, but it is not available, and nobody knows when it will be, so try this while you wait:

[Rachot]

@Pesala I guess I'll have to continue using the extension I'm using at the moment until they add this improvement.

[Pesala]

I just discovered this solution in this topic:

Go to vivaldi://translate-internals/ and clear the checkbox for your default language.

[Rachot]

@Pesala Unfortunately it doesn't work for me, I guess it's because Spanish is in the "Languages not translated" list and it won't let me delete it from the list. If I could delete it, I think I could use it as I want.

[Pesala]

@Rachot I am able to delete both English (my default) and Spanish from the list.

Clear the [x]

[Rachot]

@Pesala I can delete it by leaving Japanese, I suppose this list cannot be empty but unfortunately it does not give me the option to translate as I want.

[therealdag2]

@Pesala said in Being able to translate a page even if it is in my language:

vivaldi://translate-internals/

I have to say first of all that I find in general UX to be regressing across the board - not speaking of Vivaldi specifically, but software in general. Modern ideas like "hide menu options when they are unavailable" (or, as Microsoft did a while, even just because functions had not been used!) or "disable options that are unavailable" usually just degrade the experience, because they conflict directly with the most fundamental idea of a menu: to show the user what is on offer. In the old days, you'd click "print" or some function, and only then would the software spend time on figuring out if that's really possible, but the great upside of this approach was that it was pretty much impossible for developers to forget to provide a way for the user to (a) discover that the function exists (well, if it is always shown in the menu that takes care of itself) or (b) inform the user WHY it is not available or what must be done if it is not possible to use the function in some particular case or context... Nowadays, you can instead search forever in all menues and settings in many apps, when in fact the problem is that the program hides the function when Bluetooth is off or some trivial thing like that, that you would have found out in two seconds with the old approach (because you immediately found the function you were looking for, tried to use it, and was told "Bluetooth must be turned on to ..").

All of that having been said, I cannot get Vivaldi to behave the way I want with translation. What I want is to have easy access to translate web pages whenever I feel like it, via a page context menu, the omnibar, or a regular menu. I don't really care which one of these it is, but I would like to manually be able to look for it and use it when I want to - without having to decide once and for all how to treat every language in the world.

Right now, my use case was that I wanted to share a Norwegian-language web page with an international audience, and I was curious to see what Vivaldi's built-in translation would deliver if I translated it to English. I normally don't translate Norwegian web pages to English, but the functionality is there, so surely they have made it easy to use, right?

Wrong. They have instead added complication to outsmart me and decide on my behalf that I should not be able to do this with the built-in translation. I went to settings, I reset the translation settings, I changed my "preferred languages list" so nb-NO was no longer on top, and nothing worked, the "translate" icon in the omnibar did not appear. Then I changed my user interface language to English, and Voila - now the icon appeared, but accompanied by a very annoying overly eager popup that now suggested I translate every Norwegian page. I unchecked "automatically offer to translate pages" and got rid of the popup, but I had now simply replaced "Vivaldi won't let me translate Norwegian pages" with "Vivaldi won't let me translate English pages".

So not great. Then I came here to suggest an improvement, had a kernel crash (no idea if Vivaldi played any role in that!), went through a system update... and came back here. Found the above link to vivaldi://translate-internals/ and with that, I thought it was solved - because it looked like I could just remove all of the "languages not translated". But no, it will not allow that. It will however allow me have one never-translated language that is NOT the same as the GUI language, so although the design flaw is as present as ever, I have now achieved having a browser that provides quick and easy access to translate web pages in all languages except Esperanto. To get there, I had to find an Esperanto page online, choose "never translate", then reload the settings and remove Norwegian from the list.

It is of course great to be able to define a set of languages that should always be translated, probably many users can benefit from that. But I really think before that, get the basics right, make sure the functionality is never made unavailable because of some baseless assumption it is not needed.

I would prefer, if the icon in the omnibar exists, that it was always visible, even if the page I am at is in a language you cannot translate. Let me express my intent by trying. YOU can measure the demand for translating from said language, and I have a simple way to be informed that "Translating from Ghazunish is not supported" when I do so. Infinitely simpler and better for you the developers and us the users than all these silly hiding games.

[barbudo2005]

Use the Linguist - web pages translator extension:

https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/linguist-web-pages-transl/gbefmodhlophhakmoecijeppjblibmie

[iqaluit]

Which translation tool manages auto-translations in Vivaldi, could anyone tell? Thanks

[nomadic]

@iqaluit There is a note about the service used at the bottom of the page translation address field popup and also at the bottom of the translation panel.

It reads: "Powered by Lingvanex, hosted by Vivaldi."

[iqaluit]

@nomadic that's cool
Thanks!