Many pages don't corrextly declare their language on the HTML, so Firefox does know which language to translate from
this post was submitted on 17 Apr 2025
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I'm glad you asked. This has been irritating me for a long time.
For me, the translation option appears on that site and also detects the right language
That's weird.... I wonder what's getting in the way.
I'm on Firefox for Android Beta, meaning 138.0b7 (Build #2016085103).
Must be some setting on your end, I'm getting offered translations on that page as well (stable release).
Two things I could think of, either you haven't set it to always offer translations or your browser is set to simplified Chinese.
Another thing, you can select some text, right-click the selection, and there will be a translation option there. After you used that there will be a button for "translate the whole page" in the translation popup.
Oh also you can download more languages through the settings (general settings page, right below browser language).
Makes you wonder why there isn't just a button to translate when needed.
Ya just having the button always visible would make me 90% satisfied. Its just trying to make things "smart" but not being able to plan for all contingencies which makes it annoying. Would be better to have the option to hide it sometimes like how the Downloads toolbar icon can be either way.
I found an add-on a while ago that put a permenent button, but only for certain languages which the add-on also supported. It had some weird behavior but surely improvement. Its on a different computer I don't have access to right now to tell you which one. It was from a related/forked project to the Translations.
i thought Firefox translator didn't have and East/Southeast Asian languages besides Vietnamese (because of Roman characters) so far
No Chinese works as well as any other language for the actual translation. Here is the example link:
I have found the same issue for various European languages. It's just today I was trying to read some Chinese stuff so that's the example I picked.
I can't manage to find a list of currently supported languages from Mozilla though certainly there must be one. It seems like some Asian languages were added to the non-mainline releases earlier this year. I am using Developer on linux and it has way more languages than the original 10 or so Translations rolled out with. I also see Japanese, Greek, Arabic, Korean and a few Cyrillics in there using non-latin alphabets. So they seem to have overcome whatever the barrier was. :)
I don't know why Mozilla is shy of promoting this feature; it's so killer.
Firefox on Android 137.0.2 says to me that "Chinese isn't supported yet".