How to translate a web page in Firefox

Firefox has a built-in page translator, but it covers a few dozen languages and only translates whole pages. Mate's Firefox extension translates between 200+ languages, and also translates just the word or sentence you point at.

Install the extension

Get Mate from Firefox Add-ons. Firefox 109 or newer is required.

Translate the whole page

1. Open a page in a foreign language. Mate shows a small bar in the top-right corner: "This page is in French".
2. Click Translate to English (or whatever your target language is).
3. To go back to the original, click Switch back to French in the same bar.

If the bar doesn't appear, right-click anywhere on the page and choose Open full page translation.

Two checkboxes in the bar save you clicks next time:

• Always translate French to English translates such pages automatically. Automatic translation is a Mate Pro feature.
• Never translate French or Never translate example.com hides the bar for that language or site.

Mate doesn't offer page translation on sites that break when their text is replaced, such as Google, YouTube, Facebook, X, Notion, Figma and GitHub. Selected-text translation still works there.

Translate only a word or a sentence

Select the text. A floating Mate button appears next to it. Click it, or press Shift+T, and the translation opens right there in a tooltip. See Translate selected text on any web page for all the ways to do this.

Change the target language

Click the Mate icon in the toolbar and pick the language in the popup. The page translation bar uses the same target language.

Firefox limits

Firefox doesn't let extensions read its PDF viewer, so Mate can't translate selected text in PDFs opened in Firefox. Use Mate for Mac or the Chrome extension for PDFs.