Hover Translate

Point at any text or image, tap Ctrl, and read it in your language. Free, no account, no API key.

Point at any text on a page, tap Ctrl, and it is translated where it stands. Point at an image and it is read and translated too. Select part of a sentence and tap Ctrl on it, and only that much is replaced. Tap Ctrl again to put the original back, or press Esc to restore the whole page. No account, no sign-up, no API key, no subscription. WHAT MAKES IT DIFFERENT Most translators rebuild the paragraph they translate, which throws away the page's own markup. Hover Translate edits the text and nothing else. No element is created, moved or removed, so links keep working, images and code stay exactly as they were, and pages built with React and similar frameworks keep the DOM identity they depend on. A form field is only ever written to when you selected the words inside it yourself. HOW TO USE IT Hover any text and tap Ctrl to translate that block Hover an image and tap Ctrl to have it read Select any text and tap Ctrl on it to replace just that much Tap Ctrl on it again to restore the original Nothing fires until you let go, so holding Ctrl is how you aim; optionally it outlines the target Press Esc to restore everything at once The settings are a page of their own, opened from Details in chrome://extensions. There is no toolbar button: nothing to click, nothing to pin, nothing in your way TRANSLATING A SELECTION A block is right for a paragraph and useless for half of one, so a selection can be translated on its own. Select the words and tap the key on them: only those are replaced, in the page or inside a search box, a comment field or any other input, which is how a message goes out in a language you do not write. Type it in yours, select it, tap. It is the same key as the trigger, and what is under the pointer decides which of the two a press means: a selection where you are pointing takes it, everything else takes the block. It can be given a key of its own instead, or a second tap of the same one. Where a selection goes is read off the writing system it is in rather than from a language detector, as an ordered list you can arrange: Latin, Han, Japanese, Korean, Cyrillic, Arabic and everything else, each row either naming a language or following the row above it. Latin to Chinese with the rest coming back in English is two choices, and it means one key sends your English out in Chinese and brings every Chinese page back in English. DISPLAY MODES Replace the text, optionally marked with an outline or an underline Show both, the original with the translation underneath Show a bubble, leaving the page completely untouched THREE TRANSLATION PROVIDERS Google, Tencent TranSmart and MyMemory. Put them in whatever order you prefer; if one is unavailable the next is tried, so a single outage does not leave you without translation. A Test button on the settings page checks each one and reports whether it answered and how long it took. IMAGES Youdao, Google Lens and Yandex read the words out of a picture, again in the order you choose and with their own Test button. Image translation is off until you switch it on, because reading an image needs a permission the extension does not install with. The page is never modified: the translation is laid over the picture, which keeps its original source. FRAMES, NESTED FRAMES AND SHADOW DOM A page is rarely a single document. An iframe is a document of its own, a frame nested inside it another again, and a web component keeps its text in a shadow root. Mouse events go to the innermost frame under the pointer while key events go to whichever frame holds focus, so the two are often different documents. Hover Translate resolves the frame the pointer is actually in and answers there, at any nesting depth, and reads through open shadow roots. Text inside an embedded document translates exactly like text in the top one. WHICH ELEMENT GETS TRANSLATED The element under the pointer is not always the one meant. Hover Translate walks up to the nearest element that carries text of its own. An element holding no words itself, only other blocks, is a layout wrapper and is never a target, so a single tap cannot rewrite a whole page. Code is identified by what it contains and how it is rendered rather than by its tag, so ordinary text is still translated when a site wraps it in markup normally reserved for code. DETAILS THAT MATTER A menu or a title the page cut to one line is usually longer once translated. Rather than leave the end behind the ellipsis, that line slides while you point at it, or the box grows to fit it, whichever you prefer Choose your target language from 24 options Notices can be placed in any corner, or turned off A block already in your language is detected and skipped Code, icon fonts and anything marked notranslate are never touched Nothing is collected, stored or shared beyond the text you ask to have translated